An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

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

I think Brody would look more favorably upon the ILX results. (Another "Before You Die" construction, just like all the song polls going on. These people are really out to scare you.)

LOL, Shoah isn't even on the Spurlock list?

(Spurlock's full list)

50. Spellbound (2002)
49. Truth or Dare (1991)
48. The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
47. One Day in September (1999)
46. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998)
45. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)
44. Burma VJ (2008)
43. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)
42. Catfish (2010)
41. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
40. When We Were Kings (1996)
39. Biggie & Tupac (2002)
38. March of the Penguins (2005)
37. Inside Job (2010)
36. Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)
35. Paragraph 175 (2000)
34. Brother’s Keeper (1992)
33. Tongues Untied (1989)
32. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)
31. Jesus Camp (2006)
30. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
29. Man on Wire (2008)
28. Gasland (2010)
27. Tarnation (2003)
26. Murderball (2005)
25. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
24. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
23. The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000)
22. Shut Up & Sing (2006)
21. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
20. Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
19. Touching the Void (2003)
18. Food, Inc. (2008)
17. Street Fight (2005)
16. Bus 174 (2002)
15. Crumb (1994)
14. Dark Days (2000)
13. The Fog of War (2003)
12. Bowling for Columbine (2002)
11. Paris Is Burning (1991)
10. Grizzly Man (2005)
9. Trouble the Water (2008)
8. An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
7. The Celluloid Closet (1995)
6. The War Room (1993)
5. Supersize Me (2004)
4. Waltz With Bashir (2008)
3. Roger & Me (1989)
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
1. Hoop Dreams (1994)

5. Supersize Me (2004)

classy

One spectator asked Costa whether the film was fiction or documentary, and before Costa could answer, Straub, with his impulsive bluntness, declared, “Documentary! What kind of a word is that, ‘documentary’!? What does a film have to do with documents? Who uses documents? The police!"

that's awesome, now I want to see all Straub-Huillet.

The problem with Spurlock’s list goes beyond the narrowness of his temporal and geographical range. Many of the films on his list are of interest for their subjects, and their subjects alone, which are captured in cinematically bland or unconsidered ways.

Morgan Spurlock, honorary ILXor

lol @ straub

C'mon, Morbius, we went over this last time--fully half of your 20 made the ILX list. That's a pretty good percentage.

spurlock's list was designed to cover the last 25 years only.

haha lol. i agreed with a bunch of brody's picks but that's sorta pertinent.

A good question would be WHY cover the last 25 years only? I assume it's like when ESPN puts up graphics of baseball records "since 1990" -- bcz old stuff is just boring.

The problem with Spurlock’s list goes beyond the narrowness of his temporal and geographical range. Many of the films on his list are of interest for their subjects, and their subjects alone, which are captured in cinematically bland or unconsidered ways.

Morgan Spurlock, honorary ILXor

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius)

Morbs you voted the Shoah #1, which is about as uncinematic as you can get.

A good question would be WHY cover the last 25 years only?

The reason he gives is that they've been more commercially successful:
http://youtu.be/t1M2Elfa_cI?t=45s

not a brilliant reason. nor even that verifiable. bet 'nanook' did bigger numbers than most of the ones he names,

people don't like old shit, which is shit, but hey this is a list for plebs who have probably watched 3 documentaries in their lifetimes so let 'em get started with Hoop Dreams or something because it can't do no harm.

maybe there's an army of kids who'll be like, oh word? formerly relevant gimmick-doc hero morgan spurlock voted this the 22nd best documentary of the last quarter-century?

motherfucker just super-sized my interest in the moving dramas of the everyday

lol

abanana, sorry, make your own Holocaust doc w/ tons of fast cutting

let 'em get started with Hoop Dreams or something because it can't do no harm

To me this is the key (although I'm not sure that's the best film to illustrate your point--Hoop Dreams is pretty great by almost any barometer). I just take Spurlock's list to be a general-interest introduction for people who have probably seen a Moore or two and nothing else. And that's good. That's the way I use lists, always hoping to discover something I didn't know about. Just from all the ILX votes that came in, so far I've watched three things I didn't know about: Street Smart, A Grin Without a Cat, and Lake of Fire. I plan to work my way through some others. Maybe someone else would complain that I should have known about them already, and furthermore should have seen them already, but so what. People who start investigating Spurlock's list will sooner or later find their way to Shoah and Harlan County. (Having said that, I've never had any desire to see Super Size Me.)

No Hoop Dreams or Steve James thread that I could find...Saw him give the best Q&A I've ever seen after Hoop Dreams tonight--what a storyteller. Didn't know that both Bo (Arthur's father) and Curtis (William's brother) were murdered--Curtis on 9/11/2001, no less.

Dr. Morbius actually says I few things on this thread that I almost kinda sorta consider the vague possibility of agreeing with

it's not exactly "OTM" but it's progress

"Ok, bye thread"? That was my favourite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlvRFfoSk1U

really gritty docu by paul schrader's brother, lenny

I saw Sherman's March for the first time this afternoon--part of "the Essentials" at our new theatre. I didn't love it, but it'll stay with me. I started to find McElwee's passivity tiresome very early on, and by the time he's pestering the last woman, he's flat-out annoying. (That he realizes he's annoying doesn't make him any less annoying.) The women were all interesting, though, most of all one he wasn't after, Charleen. How significant was this? I know there are lots of experimental/essay-type documentaries that predate it, but was there an earlier feature documentary (with some limited first-run release, as I remember it) so subjective/confessional? I don't know.

Favorite line: "My interest in linguistics continues to grow."

crazy that this was morbs's last poll

lmao

I've clicked on a couple of titles, and this appears to be exactly what it says: 400 documentaries, many well known, you can watch online (via nice clean Vimeo transfers).

http://www.filmsforaction.org/walloffilms/