An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

^adapted from Metropolitan?

Dunno. Never watched it.

ha
xp

I am just gonna listen to ten albums this year (up from 2 last year) and vote in the year-end ILM poll

― satan club sandwich (Dr Morbius), Monday, August 15, 2011 7:52 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

People do this. If you listen to 10 and love 8, why would you not want to bump up those 8? Obviously you'll be making less of an impact there than you would here as more people vote in those, but why the hell not?

Funnily enough one of the nicest polls to run of late was the 1950s music poll, where nobody threw their weight of supposed expertise around or insisted that there was an objectively correct list and an objectively wrong one.* Everyone got to discover a bunch of interesting stuff and also rep for their favourites, and it enthused most of us to go and listen to more music from that era, rather than making people uptight and hostile towards each other.

*Well, except for me and my insistence that everyone should vote for '50s electro, but... I was right.

I wish I could find all the Voice polls going back 10 years--I can't. I wanted to compare their results to the ones here that Morbius and Eric H. are decrying. All I can find online for the documentary category are the past four years.

2010 -- Exit Through the Gift Shop (didn't make our Top 40, but drew three votes)
2009 -- Anvil! The Story of Anvil (#31 in our Top 40; drew more votes than The Beaches of Agnes or La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet in the Voice poll)
2008 -- Man on Wire (#13 on our list)
2007 -- No End in Sight (no votes here)

In their films of the century poll, their highest ranking documentary was Man with a Movie Camera, #16 on our list. Conceding that the Voice is hardly the last word in anything, and also that there's not a lot there to compare, I don't think our results look all that different.

Woe is me! Our results have been validated by VV!

You mean as opposed to "Our results have been invalidated by Morbius and Eric H."?

i for one appreciate morbs & eric's dissent

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v4aj5vP__lQ/TdVyv1GFpsI/AAAAAAAAP80/aoehEe9pG6g/s1600/Statler%2Band%2BWaldorf.jpg

I think those are BOTH Dr. Morbius

i like to think my thread-pissing was productive rather than... not

Like away.

i want this thread to be made into a documentary so i can never watch it and never vote for it.

The point I'm making is that you seem to be adamant that the list here has been generated by a bunch of clueless people who don't see many documentaries. So I'm assuming you extend that to the people who vote in the Voice poll.

I have no problem with dissent. I do have some ideas on how to go about it.

I'm starting to think that the only film I voted for that was released after 1990 will not be on the list. :(

I think those are BOTH Dr. Morbius

"It's like a kind of torture / To have to watch the poll!"

Here, polyphonic, take a seat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AReU2zUTgs

i sorta feel like the top ten is gonna be down-the-line enough to straighten out the concern over presentism?, like probably. if things like man on wire, which everyone seemed to love, & totally got emotionally rather than cinematically driven votes, placed somewhere lower, i assume we all stuck to our guns on the crucial stuff that should have ranked high up.

similarly, continuing tape store's thing about not necessarily having been in the right place to catch a lot of docus, i feel like the probable absence of wisemans, for example, is complicated by the lack of a consensus pick & their pretty drastic unavailability/lack of exposure for most of the past thirty years

moreso than ilx's particularly dilettantish docu habits

This is true. Still, I see the opening to act the jerk and I'm gonna take it this time.

You fuckers snubbed Chris Marker.

In favor of Billy Mitchell.

Welfare was my #3, and I would have loved for it to finish in the top 10. But I also know it's not the easiest thing in the world to see. I'm lucky to live in a city where we had a Wiseman retrospective, and where there are two or three video stores that have it on the shelf.

you guys have driven me and Eric back into a coalition of the damned.

you guys have driven me into a coalition with Morbs

This is true. Still, I see the opening to act the jerk and I'm gonna take it this time.

ha. you gotta post up your top ten when this is through; i am curious, & will make a concerted effort to atone for my un-rigorous, semi-frivolous list by eating some of the greens that pepper your list.

i don't even like 'sans soleil'... or 'grin without a cat'

but id like to see more of his old ones

Based on what I've read about it, A Grin Without a Cat is one of the things I most want to see from the ballots that came in.

speaking as a dude who watches tons of documentaries and thx to some vote tally problems already knows that only 2 of my 40 make the list, so u can all shut it imo xposts

i don't even like 'sans soleil'... or 'grin without a cat'

but id like to see more of his old ones
--cloud computing, robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, (history mayne)

You are disgusting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5Pb9nykjQA

I quite liked Grin Without a Cat but mostly remember Fidel trying to move that microphone. I also recall liking Sans Soleil... and don't remember anything from it.

And c'mon, World at War and Eyes on the Prize are longform TV shows, pure and simple.

it's partly that the 'grin' we have is some revisionist 1993 cut, i wanna see the original

not *that* much though

ok, let's be civil and wait to see if the wrong Herzog doc and the wrong Spike Lee doc finish 1-2.

had no idea Morbs was a booster for "Kobe Doin' Work"

World at War and Eyes on the Prize are longform TV shows, pure and simple.

I meant to link to this list of sports documentaries: http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2011-06/13/gq-film-best-ever-sports-documentary-movies/review. I wish'd I'd voted for Burns' baseball film after I looked at it.

I'm sure everything that's wrong with grin w/o cat stems from that disastrous decision to revise in 1993.

That's the only version I've seen.

Was thinking 4 Little Girls, DJP.

ah, I was hoping you'd run with that joke

(I should watch more documentaries; "4 Little Girls" has been on my list for a long time but I almost never want to watch or read about real-life events outside of news media)

I've only seen the original Grin Without A Cat, on a crusty VHS belonging to one of the filmmakers who polled above (/namedrop)

(/hint of namedrop)

namedrop of filmmaker awarded low-ranking poll-place in widely condemned internet vote

hahaaaa

The top 10. I expect the nature of today's complaints will have to do with predictability--past #10, which came out of nowhere on the last few ballots to arrive--there aren't really any surprises.

I found this Time Out list of the greatest documentaries: http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/599047/the-50-best-documentaries-of-all-time?page=0,1. They've got Shoah at #1 and Sans Soleil at #2--thank god for small miracles--and after that, a list that looks a lot like this one. Except ours has The King of Kong and theirs doesn't, so obviously this one's better.

#10: Streetwise (Martin Bell, 1984)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1z0V0tDtO7w/TIba_Mu20UI/AAAAAAAAAFc/z7CVeqcnvhI/s400/25411601.jpg

53 points/4 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcCFdPZ4IGI&feature=related

I will not comment on this thread today. You're welcome.

I gave Streetwise a first place vote. great movie

clemenza sets the stage for a predictable finish, only to unveil one behind-the-scenes musical dvd extra placing after another

that was a good one, I recall

I honestly don't understand getting the least bit worked up over the results when you're dealing with such a small sample size, though. Maybe I'm just too open-minded when it comes to documentaries--much more so than with narrative films--but I look at the list so far and I see a lot of good films of those that I've seen, and a few more that look really interesting of those that I haven't.

Totally OTM.

3 of mine have made it so far and I now have a lot of others I'm excited to watch. I had no idea that all documentaries are supposed to be such serious business. Just don't get why some people seem to get a rise sucking all the fun out of a casual poll.