An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

#28: The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m47RlRiYoAg/S9qSW4OYzAI/AAAAAAAAHnc/hEemo1InSAA/s1600/The.Fog.of.War.20031.jpg

27 points/3 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfPwR00HXM0

I voted for Anvil - it's another of those modern docs that have a real way with a good narrative yarn and emotional connection without seeming obscenely fake.

Finally remembered the name of a doc that gareth told me about that I was trying to find before voting: The Moon and the Sledgehammer. This looks awesome.

And my friend just got this for his birthday yesterday: Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games

And, you know what, I just realised that B.S. Johnson's short on the making of The Unfortunates may well have counted. This is what happens when you rush voting.

(I'm guessing the Barley Mow vid wouldn't count as 'a documentary', I think it's more of a collection, but still looks relevant to the interests of the thread)

#27: My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog, 1999)

http://thecinemaguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/500my_best_fiend.jpg

29 points/3 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4sg459P8m4

the weirdest thing about Hated to me is that it was directed by todd phillips.

fog of war was the top erroll morris contender for me, though i ended up not voting for it. spectacular movie

now that I see how low the point threshold was for a movie to rank, I wish I'd spread my points around to some more unconventional pictures. I was coming right off the U2 poll, where my top songs didn't rank at all, so i guess i thought i'd be wasting points.

#26: Brother's Keeper (Joe Berlinger/Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FY2687dO59c/S734xQnJpgI/AAAAAAAABLU/cktxCalNJ4U/s1600/brothers-keeper_592x299.jpg

30 points/1 vote

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlDSGMAyUrE

urgh, i never sent in a ballot

of what's been posted so far, 'spellbound' (for admittedly personal reasons) and 'los angeles plays itself' would def have been on it

huh, brother's keeper looks great. i'll have to watch for it.

I'll stop there for today. Brother's Keeper was the only film to get in on the maximum support from one voter--which is fine. One of things I love about documentaries is that a film like Anvil! The Story of Anvil can end up being every bit as compelling as The Fog of War--I had a film about bowling on my list, but not The Sorrow and the Pity. That's just the way it goes. Schlump asked earlier for some thoughts on Spellbound--just so I don't repeat myself, I'll be really lazy and link to some stuff I wrote when I listed it as my favourite film of the '00s (where I see I link to something I'd written on the film even earlier).

yea i didnt vote for it, but i ttly love brother's keeper

Fog of War is my least fave Morris. McNamara's confessional spin doesn't interest me.

brother's keeper is great

I had mixed feelings on The Fog of War too, but I found it better the second time. I think the whole point of the film is watching McNamara spin--except I wouldn't reduce it to spinning, he does seem to agonize his way through whatever it is he's trying to say.

I still don't understand how derivatives are supposed to work.

I think I've seen about six documentaries that try to explain this, and I'm still lost.

Since they came out around the same time, I always compare FoW to Capturing the Freidmans, even though they are so different. Love CtF so so so much more.

i always liked amateurist's posts on fog of war:

the film is perhaps most interesting for excavating, in part and not wholly convincingly--more on that later--the milieu out of which this guy and others who shaped cold war foreign policy came. he was a kind of technocrat, perfectly embodying the spillover between industry academia and the military.

what bugs me most--and i don't mean this as a criticism of the fil necessarily--is how much he claims innocence of the historical and political phenomena he was encountering in vietnam. when he said that he didn't understand the vietnamese hostility toward the chinese; or the fact that th e north vietnamese saw it as a liberation struggle...why not? books had been written, editorials published, etc. well before america's involvement in the region. were his circumstances and intellectual horizons really so circumscribed that mcnamara missed this completely? or is his claiming innocence--and by extrapolation the innocence rumsfeld et al may claim 30 years hence--just a way of bucking responsibility?

the film lacked a thorough enough feel for the period to throw these questions out--it remains mcnamara's story. which i believe was morris's intention and it might be a worthwhile one. why bother to make another film castigating our vietnam policy when so many exist already (or do they?)?

etc

― amateur!st (amateurist), Monday, January 19, 2004 7:14 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

I left Spellbound off my list and I feel terrible about it now. Sorry, clemenza.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism

is this a documentary? imo this is like 'any film that isn't a straightahead fictional narrative or an abstract/art/___ film'

well, The Last Waltz isn't a doc either; it's a staged event.

Just went and read up on it (so thanks for mentioning it as I now desperately want to see it) and it sounds like it counts: all the reviews suggest there is a documentary element mixed up with collage/artyshit, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable way of shaping one's work without discounting it. I don't see why a documentary can't be arty.

Surely you should have psychically divined that I wanted Spellbound to win, Emily...It's such a great film. I assume Morbius's nerd comment upthread was directed at Spellbound (maybe Winged Migration, I'm not sure). If so, I think that's so far off the mark.

As I said numerous times in the previous thread, I didn't set guidelines as to what counted as documentary (not that I have any idea where I'd set them if I were to try). People who voted decided that WR and The Last Waltz are documentaries, and that's fine with me.

Uh. I also voted for brothers keeper. Did my ballot go missing?

WR is mostly documentary - apart from a couple of short fictional scenes set in (then) Yugoslavia.
Also I mentioned this on the other thread, but I first saw WR when I was 16, and it blew my mind. Well worth checking out.

i actually wouldn't go near hated but i can see why someone'd vote it.

I voted for Hated - the main thing for me is the massive gulf between what GG thought he was doing and what other people, even his fans, were getting out of it.

Jjjusten--I'm so glad you caught that, and many apologies. I'm going to make the adjustments right now. It's an easy fix; I'm just got to move Brother's Keeper up, and retabulate points for a film that hasn't come up yet. Let me do that, and I'll be back in a few minutes to post the proper #26 (and will re-post Brother's Keeper again on Monday).

I almost voted for hated as well

Oh and no apologies needed obv

well, The Last Waltz isn't a doc either; it's a staged event.

o_0

oh boy

just ignore him

it's hard!

#26: Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/Shoah-two_opt.jpg

(30 points/2 votes)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W0WcZu9O74

Bravo

although on second thoughts a lot of that is so clearly staged, it has no place here. I find it hard to believe those guys are still walking around the camps so many years later and the camera crew just found them there

^^^ set up for a really edgy joke

That's the real #26--Brother's Keeper has moved up. As I'm sure everybody says when they mess up a countdown, I'm not sure how that happened--I'd acknowldged jjjusten' ballot when it came in. Anyway, most of jjjusten's votes were solitary, so it was as easy a fix as I could've hoped for in such a situation.

You can't find a Shoah clip on YouTube. Just the trailer, or the whole film in 59 parts.

I definitely enjoyed most of these, I think, aside from Spellbound and Brother's Keeper. Winged Migration is the one so far I haven't seen. Looks hard to get excited about, tbh.

Sad realization about what that means about the rest of my ballot slowly sinking in

d00d you're intense

Sorry to people who voted for them but IMO anvil was sorta bland who cares rock doc and inside job was just awful in every way

the Anvil doc barely made an impact on me, and I *like* '80s metal.

it's no 'night mail'

Man now I am also wishing I had 30 pointed my top 2 and gotten them in here - something tells me impaler isn't going to make it

voters should have seen at least 20 documentaries total.

I was kind of touched by Anvil. Not a big metal guy.

did you even vote Morbius?

I did, Tammy Tam Tam, and since Shoah is my #1, ah'm dreading the rest.

There are going to be about 10 decent eps of "Behind the Music" in this

I didn't vote, btw.

i considered a few metal docs, but i settled on... i guess we'll see if it places. i'm betting not

another opinion 4 u: talking about what is/isn't a documentary is pretty much the most boring insufferable thing ever. n.b. i got a year of that bullshit in school. IT DOES NOT MATTER, AT ALL.

dr morbius seriously? go fuck yourself

easy now

I found the lead girl in Seventeen exceedingly annoying, so that interfered with all that was good about it. Great freeze-frame ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwX1Y-BGR58

the NYC Quad is having a Claude Lanzmann retro... anyone ever seen his first feature, Israel, Why (1973)? The only iMdB-linked reviews are in German.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069115/fullcredits/

https://quadcinema.com/film/israel-why/