documentaries-recomendations/favs.?

Started by NEON MERCURY, March 06, 2004, 08:42:54 PM

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Reel




The mythos of a faceless, digital-age bogeyman known as Slenderman was created on the Internet, but his influence was felt in the real world when two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods for a brutal murder.





The most disturbing documentary I've seen in a long time. Whenever I'd tried to read into this case, I found it hard to understand how an imaginary character could provoke these girls to do such an awful thing. If Slenderman loomed so large in their minds, why has there never been a similar occurrence? The doc explores how a combination of feeling socially outcast, suffering mental illness, and a little too much time reading spooky stories on the internet led them to commit an unthinkable act. The interrogation scenes are especially creepy, to hear the cold and calculated plans for first degree murder spoken in these little girls voices. You really can't help but pity them by the end for operating under such a grand delusion.

wilder

B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin (2015). Available on blu-ray in Germany



Music, art and chaos in the wild West-Berlin of the 1980s. The walled-in city became the creative melting pot for sub- and pop-culture. Before the iron curtain fell, everything and anything seemed possible. B-MOVIE is a fast-paced collage of mostly unreleased film and TV footage from a frenzied but creative decade, starting with punk and ending with the Love Parade, in a city where the days are short and the nights are endless. Where it was not about long-term success, but about living for the moment - the here and now.


Just Withnail

B-Movie is great. A really vivid portrait of 80s Berlin.

wilder

A more interesting subject and story than accomplished documentary. Streaming on Prime.



Quote from: Nathan Rabin, The DissolveAs a writer and a man, countercultural icon Iceberg Slim was blessed and cursed with deep sensitivity. Though he adopted a veneer of invulnerability as a hustler's professional mask, the notorious pimp-turned-author understood how what he called his "poisonous pimp charisma" and "phony glamour" affected vulnerable young women. He knew the cost of prostitution not just on prostitutes, but also on pimps, whose psyches were shaped by the brutality and violence of street life.

The man born Robert Lee Maupin, who also went by Robert Beck (after his mother's last husband), was scarred by parental abandonment and a tortured relationship with his mother. But his understanding of the human psyche and his own pain didn't lead him to empathize with the prostitutes he mistreated, even as it allowed him to write about the seamy underworld with unusual psychological insight. Beck's work combined a pimp's loquaciousness with a pronounced literary bent and a pulp writer's gift for lurid storytelling. When he entered the writing game late in life, Beck wasn't just a washed-up former pimp with a typewriter and some crazy stories to share; he was a real writer, and his seminal treatises on the ugliness of the criminal world continue to cast a long shadow over hip-hop and pulp fiction.

Robyn

a while back I wanted to start a thread like this.

do anyone know some good sports documentaries?

Alethia

Hoop Dreams! The Ken Burns Baseball series is really cool, too. This might be stretching it, but Herzog's The Great Ecstacy of the Woodcarver Steiner (about a sculptor/ski jumper) is also well worth checking out.

polkablues

Hoop Dreams is fantastic. I'll also recommend the HBO series Hard Knocks, which follows one NFL team's training camp each year, typically focusing on a handful of players who may or may not end up making the team.
My house, my rules, my coffee

wilder


wilder

This thread so far. Also compiled on Letterboxd

Crime

Brother's Keeper (1992)
Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
Dear Zachary (2008)
Into the Abyss (2011)
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012)
Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills (1996)
Party Monster (1998)
The Prince of Pennsylvania (2015) - "30 for 30" S03E02
The Staircase (2004)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop (2015)



Drugs and Addiction

Cold Turkey (2001) (sequel to Don't Get High...)
Don't Get High on Your Own Supply (1998)
Modstrlogin (1966)
TV Junkie (2006)



History

4 Little Girls (1997)
Afrique 50 (1950)
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)



Individuals

42 Up (1998)
The Cruise (1998)
Crumb (1994)
David Holzman's Diary (1967)
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997)
Gates of Heaven (1978)
Grey Gardens (1975)
Grizzly Man (2005)
Iceberg Slim: Story of a Pimp (2012)
In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)
Larisa (1980)
The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975)
Marjoe (1972)
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
O.J: Made in America (2016)
Pedal (2001)
Rich Hill (2014)
Seymour: An Introduction (2014)
Sherman's March (1985)
Stevie (2002)
We Live in Public (2009)
Zoo (2007)



Music

20 Feet from Stardom (2013)
B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin (2015)
Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back (1967)
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
Gimme Shelter (1970)
Hated: GG Allen and the Murder Junkies (1993)
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco (2002)
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Woodstock (1970)



Other

Baraka (1992)
Beware the Slenderman (2016)
Sweetgrass (2003)
Winged Migration (2001)



Politics

Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Lake of Fire (2006)
Roger & Me (1989)
Weiner (2016)



Sociological / Subcultures

Animal Love (1996)
Born Into Brothels (2004)
The Devil's Playground
Frat House (1998)
Girl Model (2011)
Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976)
How to Die in Oregon (2011)
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982)
Land Without Bread (1933)
Leviathan (2012)
Megacities (1998)
Milestones (1975)
Near Death (1985)
Okie Noodling (2001)
On the Bowery (1956)
The Overnighters (2014)
Paris is Burning (1990)
Salesman (1969)
Seventeen (1983)
Spellbound (2002)
Startup.com (2001)
Streetwise (1984)
Titicut Follies (1967)
Vernon, Florida (1981)
Whore's Glory (2011)
Wildwood, NJ (1994)



Sports

Baseball (1994)
Dogtown and the Z-Boys (2001)
The Endless Summer (1966)
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)
Hard Knocks (2001)
Hoop Dreams (1994)
Lenny Cooke (2013)
On Any Sunday (1971)
Olympia (1938)
Senna (2010)
Touching the Void (2003)
When We Were Kings (1996)



War

The Color of War (2001)
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987)
Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987)
The Fog of War (2003)
Hearts and Minds (1974)
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)
Night and Fog (1956)
Shoah (1985)
The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)
Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (1995)
Winter Soldier (1972)



Filmmaking

American Movie (1999)
A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
Los Angles Plays Itself (2003)
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)
My Best Fiend - Klaus Kinski (1999)
Overnight (2003)
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

9 to 5: Days in Porn (2008)
Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1999)


(Added TV Junkie, Streetwise, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Zoo, Mea Maxima Culpa, The Overnighters, Overnight, Los Angeles Plays Itself, The Jinx, Party Monster, Touching the Void, On the Bowery, In the Realms of the Unreal, O.J. Made in America, Lost Soul, Dogtown and the Z-Boys, Paradise Lost, Into the Abyss, Murder on a Sunday Morning, The Devil's Playground, We Live in Public, and Z Channe)l

WorldForgot

Senna, The Endless Summer, and On Any Sunday are must watch for fanz of the respective sports. They analyze people, culture and history culminating in triumph/tragedy, as much as they do passion + athleticism.

BB

The Safdie bros' doc LENNY COOKE is legit one of the best sports docs I've ever seen.

Robyn

Nice. Thank you!

I will definitely check out a few of these. The Endless Summer and When We Were Kings looks very interesting.

Robyn

I wish to add this to the Wilder list. This documentary fills me with joy.


wilder


WorldForgot


A chilling case that questions angles of empathy. When does sympathy, or support, become criminal?

Presented in two partz:  "The Prosecution" and "The Defense"
from Erin Lee Carr, the same director that did Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop and At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal for HBO.