An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

Here's Billy Dods' ballot (x-post):

1. With Orson Welles: Stories from a Life in Film
2. 7 Up
3. The Kid Stays in the Picture
4. The American Civil War
5. The Last Waltz
6. Oil City Confidential
7. The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon
8. Cosmos
9. Inside Job
10. From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring

My submission:

Man on Wire (2008)
My Best Fiend (1999)
Grizzly Man (2005)
The King of Kong (2007)
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Hoop Dreams (1994)
Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002)
Night Mail (1936)
Dig! (2004)
For All Mankind (1989)

10. From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring

Yay! If I'd thought someone else might vote for it I might have given it more than 5 points.

I feel unexpectedly disturbed and upset that I missed the poll for this.

you can probably still receive the kind of aggressive scrutiny and accusations of cinematic perjury from us that you would have got, had you voted in a timely fashion. just write up a top ten. the fall-out of this has really padded my list of stuff to watch, btw.

I'd like to get my disdain for Nicole's credentials in early, please.

this list is terrible; and not even on time; and such small portions

Her feminine "upset" at missing the deadline will of course colour whatever judgment she might once have had.

So I finished Streetwise last night and it was, as everyone said, excellent. I won't go into detail because I don't want to spoil it for those who expressed interest in seeing it. It seems that Martin Bell made another film about Tiny in 2005 called "Erin". http://www.maryellenmark.com/films/titles/erin/erin_home_page.html There are clips there but I can't find the whole film online. If anyone else can I'd really appreciate it.

guy seemingly made a feature back in seattle featuring the smokingest & baddest jeff bridges, also, e:

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/551/amheart0.jpg

Damn, Jeff!

would vote for best actor nom based on that one still alone

ps also nom in both senses, lookin good jb

lol

Oh and next up, as I plow through the ones I haven't seen, is Crumb which I should receive from Netflix tomorrow.

How did you see Streetwise? I thought it was unavailable. (We've got a cult-leaning store here that has everything--I haven't checked there.) I'm confident you'll find your first encounter with Crumb memorable.

it's on the internet

It's on youtube. I think that one part might have been left out but if it was it was only about 8 mins. The rest is all there. Yeah, I'm pretty stoked about watching Crumb.

I'd like to find streetwise to see it uninterrupted and not on youtube somehow but idk if that's possible. Still glad i could watch it some way though.

i have streetwise on vhs but ive not watched it yet

Right--I knew that from providing a link above, but forgot. I'm going to check that store, otherwise I'll probably wait and hope.

Wow, so thankful to be tipped off to "Streetwise." That movie is incredibly well shot. The opening scene alone would be all time intro to any film, fiction or not.

Why is it out of print? Music clearances? Looks like it was produced by Willie Nelson!

The opening scene alone would be all time intro to any film, fiction or not.

Yeah, Tamtam mentioned this upthread and it's so true.

You guys are convincing me to break my rule about watching whole films off YouTube.

(Aesthetic rule, not ethical.)

i watched streetwise, really great. the 1st thing i thought was how the hell did they get these kids 2 trust them enough so that anecdote upthread is v cool

I was reading yesterday that they are still following Tiny and think of her as a life subject and plan to release more work about her. They talk to her weekly on the phone.

So a bunch of people picked Paradise Lost, right?

Just saw this:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20094282-504083.html

Watching Crumb. Woah

Was it here or somewhere else where I saw that "Paradise Lost 3" was completed and set to premiere at Toronto, but that the directors had to shoot a new ending! They were in court, I guess, when the guys were let out.

Managed to get Streetwise (on VHS, no less) and A Grin Without a Cat at the video store I mentioned earlier on this thread--will watch them this week. I offered to buy Streetwise from them, but because it never got a DVD release, they want to keep it in the store.

That Streetwise tape is probably 20 years old...

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

ower bit bog oil, west yorkshire 1962

Has anyone seen the Morgan Spurlock-hosted 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die countdown?:
http://current.com/shows/fifty-documentaries/episodes/

yeah it's shit

only covers the last two decades iirc and is just really cheap and interviewing ppl at pressers and shit like that

Streetwise is good, but I didn't find it as compelling as the people who voted for it--except maybe the end, which came as a surprise.

A Grin Without a Cat was tough for me. The footage is great, and I think I could sit through it again as a silent. One problem was that I had a hard time hearing all the narration--partly because it was a little muffled to begin with (maybe the fault of the transfer), and also because it was often overtop people onscreen talking. The other problem was that I simply didn't have enough background knowledge to make sense of it all (that's where the narration would have helped). I'm usually pretty well grounded when it comes to the '60s and '70s, but much of the criss-crossing maze of events depicted here felt obscure. My limitation, not the film's.

I had the same trouble with the sound. I'm not an expert on the era (I was pretty lucky to have just read Brody's Godard book to get a better sense of the May 68 timeline), but once he got to the title (and the "Spearhead without a Spear" line), I just took it all as a deflated Marxist performing an autopsy on the last era of hope and its failure. It came in from Netflix and I wasn't keen on watching 3 hours of it, but I wound up getting through it all in one sitting.

maybe u shld have watched it with subtitles

i know the english narration of san soleil weirds me out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Swy8q2CkOI&feature=related

>>>>>english dub

Subtitles hadn't occurred to me--I'm going to check for the companion film, and if they've got it, I'll try that. I got the general sense of it being an autopsy for a lost era, but I missed the nuances. I wasn't sure if the tone was disillusionment or irony or what.

what's Harlan County about? never heard of it, but it's clearly crazy popular.

attempts at strike busting in a mining community. at one point one of the bosses' hired goons is caught shooting at strikers on film

the subtitle track on Grin (as far as I saw) only translated the other languages into French. It didn't subtitle the English narration. I might not have seen the "For the hearing impaired" option though. xposts

french narration, english subtitles wld be my preference based on sans soleil

my local cinema showed grin during a marker season but i was a fuckin ass and didn't go

no one repping for Hearts Of Darkness? kinda surprising.

hahaha it's really interesting if you like apocalypse now a lot, which i do, but it's all like "and we realized this was our own vietnam" no fuck off really

I checked back, and Hearts of Darkness only got one vote--that surprised me. One thing I forgot to mention in either this thread or the voting thread was Cinemania. Not great, but worth seeing if you spend way too much time at the movies.

*whistles innocently*

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/09/morgan-spurlock-documentaries.html