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I almost hesitate to call The Killing of America a documentary because of its editorial but when you consider that's what pretty much every documentary is nowadays, from totally fabricated nonsense like Zeitgeist to whatever that one is that's just an advertisement for juicers, I'd say it's in good company.
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Apr 29, 2013 18:03
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Halloween Jack posted:Bigger, Stronger, Faster? Very funny.
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Apr 29, 2013 18:41
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What's a real documentary? I'm serious. Nearly every single one I can think of has been manipulated to hell.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:17
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I feel like that's a little disingenuous. That's like saying Ali G is pure documentary. Not to dis Theroux but he's definitely got a schtick and he's definitely not some paragon of an objective documentarian.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:45
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mod sassinator posted:Werner Herzog documentaries are pretty good about not having too much of an agenda in my opinion. I think it's because he's always looking for the weird personal stories happening behind the scenes. For example Into The Abyss covers a pretty political issue without the heavy handedness of Michael Moore-style documentaries. Herzog just focuses on interviewing a man who's about to die, and its effect on him and his family. I think Herzog is a far better documentarian than Moore as is Theroux but unless you're talking about, I dunno, some thing about following around a family of moose you're not likely to get a neutral perspective on anything.
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Apr 30, 2013 05:40
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penismightier posted:Even then, just by making the moose doc you're probably making some kind of eco-statement. Yes, or what I immediately thought of, something tons of nature docs do - they anthropomorphize the animals. fancyclown posted:Even a fly-on-the-wall type of documentary like the Maysles brothers Salesman (1968) (which is awesome by the way) creates it's "truth" by editing events sometimes in a non chronological order to make the audience emotionally attached. Yeah, exactly. Watch that, and then watch John Landis' Slasher and see how different two takes on basically the same subject can be. The presence of editing alone makes film biased. I don't mean to make a false equivalency where I'm saying flat nonsense like The Man Who Saw Tomorrow/Zeitgeist is at the same level of "truth-telling" (or whatever it may be) as Food, Inc or even a Vice doc. But on that continuum almost no documentaries even approach "objectivity". exquisite tea posted:Probably been recommended before but very powerful, The Celluloid Closet is an adaptation of the Vito Russo book concerning portrayals of gay and lesbian relationships in Hollywood, from the Hays Code to today. It's worth watching just for the more obscure movie clips alone, and uniquely uplifting as far as documentaries go. I love documentaries like this, or stuff like Not Quite Hollywood/Blank City that's just a tour of this whole world you had no idea existed. Diodeous posted:Documentarians should take the approach that many social scientists are taking: don't try to go through all of the fuss of pretending to be neutral or trying to attempt to correct for your bias; be upfront about your views and try to produce work that stands on its own merit and is not unnecessarily distracted by efforts to present objectivity. As consumers we have to accept and digests what we're presented with and then we create our own understanding of the subject material and decide from there. The bias will always be there, regardless of how the film-maker presents the material, so all we can do is hope that the quality of the factual contents outweighs whatever elements of bias are purposely included/excluded. In the case of someone like Theroux, its interesting to watch him struggle with his own thoughts and emotions and to see him try to naively bait his subjects into revealing more, and I have to think that his inability to hide his bias or to try to be objective is what gives color to his interviews Sorry for skipping over this, you basically just said what I am trying to say more plainly and succinctly, so good poo poo. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 15:27
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I actually think Faces of Death 1 is far less hokey than the series would become, but it's still in the Mondo template of throwing in some Bizarre Foods or whatever to break up the tone, so it comes off as more like cheeky ethnography. Killing of America is a movie with a singleminded, almost millenarian thesis about society in upheaval. Since it's written and directed by Paul Schrader's brother, I like to think it's the Mondo movie Travis Bickle would make.
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May 1, 2013 12:59
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They put it all back in in Boondock Saints 2.
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May 11, 2013 20:27
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The dot com bubble analogy is very apt as you had people losing big on deals to back startups that neither produced a product nor offered any discernible service.
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May 11, 2013 22:26
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The definitive one would be PBS's multipart Eyes on the Prize.
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Jun 5, 2013 18:42
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The LGBT thread kind of reminded me of it, but The Goddess Bunny documentary has always struck me as being quite different than what I expected (a ghoulish freak parade): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wepeIOhlEDA I actually find it pretty affecting.
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Jun 19, 2013 04:55
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American Juggalo owns.
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Jun 19, 2013 05:33
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outlier posted:So, for more and better content see Documentary.net (there's a plugin for XBMC) and , to pick one at random, "Anaheim, a tale of two cities": http://documentary.net/anaheim-a-tale-of-two-cities/ "Protests against police brutality were met with riot-clad gear police and rubber bullets, further fuelling violence and bringing national attention to the home of Disneyland ... it just looked like our happiest place on earth had just turned into Afghanistan" Thanks for the heads up, I never feel like installing random poo poo into XBMC but this looks good.
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Jun 19, 2013 14:22
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When the movie Rosewood came out, people really didn't believe it was based on a true story, but that actually happened, a whole community was wiped out because whites didn't like living next to a community of prosperous blacks. Worse is that it wasn't an isolated incident.
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Jul 31, 2013 00:32
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I think pulling a drug because of the ignorance of the scientists who invented and tested it causing a preventable situation that resulted in dramatic birth defects is like the opposite of overreaction.
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Aug 13, 2013 16:10
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Well yeah, that just means there needed to be like actual clinical trials and not just flying by the seat of your pants based on hunches, which is how it became such a clusterfuck to begin with. It was a story of negligence and lack of oversight and I think they reacted in pretty much the only way they could've ethically.
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Aug 13, 2013 17:33
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Yeah, I mean, DDT has a legitimate use - that doesn't mean it was wrong for it to be banned. Controlled, judicious and knowledgeable application of something incredibly dangerous (and the key here is poorly understood) cannot be underestimated because if you arrogantly assert that your product is perfectly safe without having the data to back that up, clearly the consequences of that carelessness can present themselves quite dramatically.
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Aug 13, 2013 18:56
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Dr.Caligari posted:West of Memphis is really a great glimpse into seeing how our justice system works "Well they admitted to it, so we've got our killers Watching the first one again after I hadn't really seen it since it aired, it leapt out at me that right at the start, they just straight up show you three uncensored nude corpses of some eight year olds. That threw me, big time. That and the fact that there's like 12 million dollars worth of Metallica songs just as ambient soundtrack.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:24
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" Without even considering they, you know, got out of prison for admitting their guilt
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I honestly can't watch First 48.
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Sep 7, 2013 22:51
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I find it really, really depressing, like moreso than any crime show.
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Sep 8, 2013 06:05
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Yep, it's those exact two things. People will kill each other over 250 dollars, people will kill each other because they suspect you may have seen them selling drugs, people will kill you because they think you're talking to their girlfriend.
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Sep 8, 2013 14:03
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It's a dispiriting illustration of what poverty does to human dignity. Also, one thing I've always thought was really wild (back when you could make a show like To Catch A Predator and not get sued out of existence) was that they didn't blur out the faces of witnesses, which I think they changed in later seasons.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:54
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I and II are on Youtube, no dice for III.
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Oct 5, 2013 22:24
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You need to watch Hated to see where The Hangover came from.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:09
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I think the one he's talking about is Right America: Feeling Wronged.
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Oct 22, 2013 01:45
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Ropes4u posted:Are there any similar documentaries on the whacko left? Who, specifically? Occupy, or something?
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Oct 22, 2013 14:28
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Here's a couple of good, sarcastic British documentaries about Nazi and Stalinist architecture, respectively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTfbBvIEbfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtoAvSlWxNE
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Nov 11, 2013 04:24
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spooky_rob posted:What are some good documentaries about the Mexican drug cartels? El Sicario Room 164
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Nov 21, 2013 19:33
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The excellent Youtube channel Unreported World has some stuff on Mexico's cartel violence: http://www.youtube.com/user/UnReportedWorld1
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Nov 25, 2013 05:33
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:The issue is that we shouldn't imprison and torture intelligent living beings, it's not "well if a whale is like a person we should put it on trial like a person!", that's psychotic. It's an interesting point because that's kind of the heart of the matter. That is de facto the indifference to Tillikum's unjust plight. He and his kind were kidnapped from their natural habitat, went psychotic from the confinement and social isolation, dared to lash out then got labeled as a troublemaker. The handwringing answer? It's not all that bad because some of them like it. Look at the crowds. They also back up their support for this confinement by pointing out that when released, these animals who've lived a brutal life of imprisonment can now no longer function in among their own kind. The film doesn't anthropomorphize him for nothing.
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Dec 20, 2013 19:40
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I blame the frame and not the picture. Incidentally, that is why a lot of people just offhandedly dismiss the issues presented in the film, because they find the anthropomorphism absurd at face. I don't agree but I think that's valid for a number of reasons.
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Dec 20, 2013 19:57
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I agree. But then, that raises other interesting questions people would rather not talk or think about.
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Dec 20, 2013 20:13
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By anthropomorphizing the subject to that degree, you're asking the viewer to take a stance: either understand that this is "just" a narrative device and treat it as such, or to allow yourself to sympathize fully and reach a conclusion, which as you say is "obviously" not to imprison animals for our amusement. Even before getting into what this means for our fellow human beings (the very first thing I thought of watching this was The House I Live In), the obviousness of that ethical stance is enough to provoke thoughts about all kinds of things we just accept as facts of life and that is disturbing in a literal sense. It's a lot easier and much less disturbing to just dismiss it as cheap anthropomorphism, even if the film does make a lot of great points about both not anthropomorphizing animals to that degree while also understanding that our fellow animals are complex organisms with emotional lives. Actually, poo poo, I just made the same point as All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. A lot of modern commentary focuses on the fact that humans are nasty, greedy and shortsighted and the current trend seems especially fixated on justifying this. I feel like we're in the midst of a growing ideology of bloodcurdling just-so stories that do nothing but reinforce why the optimal choice is not to care and disconnect yourself from any empathy for the sake of your own comfort. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 20:42
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The other thing that's cool is something like animal rights has become kind of a byword for irrelevant activist liberalism, so for something like this could even garner the reaction it has is a further indicator of where public consciousness has regressed to. The insanely gruesome and harrowing Earthlings could not possibly have reached this audience and have its message received well.
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Dec 20, 2013 20:59
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For sure. I think people are acculturated to that. In general I don't think people don't just think of other living things (or even other people) as objects.
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Dec 20, 2013 21:41
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Charlie Brooker's 2013 wipe. Notable for the part where Jeremy Irons suggests legalized gay marriage means dads can marry their sons for the purpose of passing on their money in an easier manner. Charlie's reaction is great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUSwhdp7j48 I need to see Dogging Tales.
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Dec 30, 2013 20:50
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El Gallinero Gros posted:I was amused by the bit where Charlie talked about Sex Box. What a loving idea for a show. We go back and forth but the UK definitely gives us a run for our money when it comes to bottom of the barrel TV. e: You know, this is why Anglophilia is so stupid; you would never get to the good stuff if it was up to the Whovians. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 21:13
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Sex Box could not possibly be a real show.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:32
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If we steal Sex Box we at least have to have audio.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:37
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Banano posted:And to think that something as straightforward as Touch The Truck was enough to traumatise Brooker's mind so severely that satire was no longer possible for him. Cultural osmosis, man, Hands on a Hardbody contests go back to the 50's (40's maybe)? in the US. Nathan Barley was loving great.
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Dec 31, 2013 15:24
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