Movie Documentaries

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eagledream

Team Captain
Mar 29, 2008
330
1
Adelaide
AFL Club
West Coast
Hey boys,

Lately have been watching a few recommended doco's. I'd like to hear of some more that can broaden my mind, give an alternative perspective or are just informative. I've recently watched Zeitgeist, The Bridge, and RIP. I'm sure there are some knowledgeable blokes in here who don't just accept being fed as truth. Give me what you've got.

Cheers

p.s - Louis Theroux has some absolute corkers. Particularly "Thai Brides" and "The Most Hated Family In America".
 
Lots of love for Louis. If you haven't already, watch any of the ones he has done on jails/prison. Here's a few others I really enjoyed:

"Inside Job" - Won an Oscar and is a really good film. By about 15 minutes in I was already seething.
"Exit Through The Gift Shop" - Beaten by Inside Job for the Oscar, but its really entertaining. Might be fake though ...
"Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room" - Similar to Inside Job and an extremely angering film.
"The Lightbulb Conspiracy" - All about planned obsolescence.

You should check out www.documentaryheaven.com to see lots of them (often based on collections of Youtube videos). There are some really interesting films there as well.

And its hard to go past the 7 Up series.
 
Forgot to mention, be careful with the ones from Documentary Heaven. And I guess with any documentaries. Don't believe everything they tell you because its a documentary. Use your analysis skills. I only say this because some of the ones on DH are absolute rubbish.
 

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Demon Lover Diary, is the whacked out doco on the making of the incredibly s**t, z-grade schlock horror film, "Demon Lover". Don and Jerry are a coupla factory worker dork losers, whose dream it is to make their own horror movie. Jerry apparently cut one of his fingers off so as the compo would fund their film.

What ensues is not for the feint-hearted. These wack-jobs even pay a visit to Ted Nugent, to buy guns off him, which they in turn use to shoot at the doco makers.

Funny as all ****!
 
Some older ones, you could probably do a Bigfooty search

Anyway --

The World at War narrated by Laurence Olivier
Australians at War
Lords of the Mafia
Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man
Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
The Classic Albums series
Imagine: John Lennon
Voyage of the Nautilus
The Sorrow and the Pity
Last Stand of the 300
Simon Schama's A History of Britain
The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai
Churchill's Bodyguard
The Last Plane Out of Berlin
Night and Fog
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'
Ken Burns' The Civil War
The Eyes of Vichy
Some of Our Airmen Are No Longer Missing
Hôtel Terminus
The Occult History of the Third Reich
Carl Sagan's Cosmos
Guinea Pig Club
Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness
Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood
Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
The Prime Minister Is Missing
Hitler's Lost Sub
The Day That Panicked America
Triumph of the Will
Menzies and Churchill at War

The Hellstrom Chronicle (not strictly a doco)
The Jupiter Menace (pure tripe)
 
Hoop Dreams is on ABC2 tonight. Powerful doco about two Afro-American high school teenagers growing up in a terrible part of Chicago with dreams of turning professional.
 
Dixie Flatline said:
Hoop Dreams is on ABC2 tonight. Powerful doco about two Afro-American high school teenagers growing up in a terrible part of Chicago with dreams of turning professional.
Click to expand...
Was just going to mention this.
Best sporting doco I've seen easily, probably favourite.
 
You sound like a little bit of a conspiracy type so I'll recommend "The Root of All Evil" by Richard Dawkins. A really fascinating thinker, even if you don't agree with his views.

If you are fascinated by the macabre, try "Deliver Us From Evil" or "Capturing the Friedmans". Both are investigative documentaries with very sick stories.

A few others that come to mind are:

"King of Kong" - not what it seems
"Waiting for Superman" - a must if you have kids
"No End in Sight" - comprehensive review of the f*ckups in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Very political.
"Grizzly Man"
 
At over 18 hours is it a pretty long documentary and there are some sections that aren't as interesting as others, but my favourite doco is:

NEW YORK: A Documentary Film

This doco is directed by Ric Burns, who is the brother of Ken Burns who is famous for his docomentaries on Baseball, The Civil War and Jazz.

The story about the Triangle Clothing company always gets to me, it's a real heart wrenching story.
 
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Got weekly episodes on foxtel. Talks about 9/11, JFK, Plum Island and a few others. Has a few pieces on youtube as well. Just one of those people whos enjoyable to listen to, and isnt just your average kid making up some show. He's a former Governer in the US, and if your into conspiracys, he's well worth a listen to.
 
I saw a great doco on the omaha beach landing on D-Day. Narrated by Richard Hammond. Just phenomenal - the bravery of the men that day and the number of deaths were incredible.
 
As just mentioned, Hoop Dreams is fantastic. I missed it last night but I would highly recommend it.

If you are interested in sporting documentaries in general, the 30 for 30 series is brilliant.
http://30for30.espn.com/

My personal favourites from there are Once Brothers which tells the tale of a group of Yugoslavian basket ballers that were the first to enter the NBA and make a real impact, who then had to deal with the civil war in the Balkans and the affect it had on their friendships. Brilliant.

Also, from the series, Without Bias. The story of Len Bias who was picked by the Boston Celtics in the 1986 draft, only to die of a drug overdose 2 days later. His death is said to be responsible for the strong drug laws in the US today.

One of the best documentaries that I have ever seen is Murder on a Sunday Morning. A fantastic look at a young guy that is arrested for murder and the effort by the defence team to get him off. Appalling to see how easily he was put away as the only suspect. This won best doco at the Academy Awards 2001.

http://[URL="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307197/"][/URL]

Closer to home, Rats in the Ranks is a brilliant fly on the wall doco about the mayoral election in Leichhardt. It is a brilliant expose of the inner workings of council. It may not sound like the most interesting subject matter, but it is incredible. Brilliant, colourful characters.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138052/
 

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eagledream said:
Hey boys,

Lately have been watching a few recommended doco's. I'd like to hear of some more that can broaden my mind, give an alternative perspective or are just informative. I've recently watched Zeitgeist, The Bridge, and RIP. I'm sure there are some knowledgeable blokes in here who don't just accept being fed as truth. Give me what you've got.

Cheers

p.s - Louis Theroux has some absolute corkers. Particularly "Thai Brides" and "The Most Hated Family In America".
Click to expand...

I don't know anyone who has watched more documentaries than me. I'm female though so I hope it's ok to answer the op.

I've seen every Louis theroux documentary, he did a follow up on the Westbro baptist church. Also look out for his doco on Israel/Palestine. The best one I've seen as he provides insight to both sides - this is rare on documentaries about this conflict. I have most on dvd.

What is 1 degree? - is an excellent documentary about temperature. Who knew that temperature is determined by the speed at which particles move down at the molucular level. It's a good one. BBC/horizon and the poms in general make brilliant documentaries.

The corporation - canadian doco, pretty good. Canadians are also good at making docs.

Gasland - not bad

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - is brilliant

before the music dies

There are some fantastic american docos but I find the ones on cosmology are usually accompanied by an annoying overbearing voiceover.

Quite a few interesting docs on the fall of yugoslavia as well as pedophilia in the catcholic church and the corruption around it.

There's a good doco on Glenn Gould, if you're into music.

Fantastic british doc series called ATOM - if you're into that kind of thing which i am.

topdocumentaries and documentary heaven are 2 good doc sites.

"through the wormhole" consists of 2 series which tackle the big questions like 'what's after the universe" and "is there a creator" - they are enjoyable imo.

Wise words from me, beware of conspiracy documentaries. They will only rot your brain. :)
 
The Thin Blue Line

Beyond the Gates of Splendor

The War You Don't See

Dark Days

Visions of Light

The one about the Manhattan Tower murders
 
Watched Hoop Dreams last night for the first time and it was indeed brilliant. Sad to go on wiki and find that Curtis Gates and Bo Agee were both murdered later on.

One of my favourites is Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. Fascinating look at how the idea of a fair trial can crumble in high-profile cases.
 
A lot of good ones listed already. Paradise Lost, mentioned above, is one the OP would probably like.

Hoop Dreams is a must watch.

The Thin Blue Line
Grizzly Man
Man on Wire
American Movie (hilarious)
Stevie
 
Plenty of great ones already mentioned but here are some of my favourites:

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Collapse
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Thin Blue Line
Senna
The Fog of War
Inside Job
Bowling for Columbine
Loose Change
Man on Wire
The Smashing Machine
Hoop Dreams
Pumping Iron
Devil at your Heels
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
King of Kong
Capturing the Friedmans
Deliver Us from Evil
DIG!
 
A Crude Awakening - peak oil and its implications, which most people haven't fully thought through.

Food, Inc. - an examination of industrialised food production, more thought-provoking than graphic.

Point Of Order - profiling and dissection of Joe McCarthy.

The Up series is also very good (Seven Up!, Seven Plus 7, 21 Up, etc.)
 
krautrock is an excellent documentary by the BBC.

I've seen quite a few of Adam Curtis's documentaries, "The power of nightmares" - Suggested a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them.

"The century of self" - How Freud's discoveries concerning the unconscious led to Edward Bernays' (freud's nephew) development of public relations, the use of desire over need and self-actualisation as a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of population.

"All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" - The computer as a model of the world around us.

His documentaries are interesting.
 
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