Jerry Seinfeld-Comedian - Like the real life version of the Curb Your Enthusiasm pilot, but with Jerry trying to develop a new act to take on the road. It also follows an up-and-coming comedian, Orney Adams, which was equally entertaining.

I was suprised how little attention this got given the buzz for everything Seinfeld related. Maybe people were expecting a comedy and didn't appreciate this interesting documentary. There were plenty of funny parts (including the dvd commentary), just not the same kind of humor as the TV shows.

A few I've enjoyed lately and haven't seen mentioned:

Entertaining trash: Crackheads Gone Wild
Cultural history: Godfathers of Mondo and New York Doll
Politics/Current Events: The Power of Nightmares (3 episodes)

Incident At Oglala: On June 26, 1975, during a period of high tensions on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, two FBI agents were killed in a shootout with a group of Indians. Although several men were charged with killing the agents, only one, Leonard Peltier, was found guilty. This film describes the events surrounding the shootout and suggests that Peltier was unjustly convicted.

On that note, I highly recommend The Blue Planet series.

To all in the NYC area, they're screening The Cats of Mirikitani at Cinema Village 22 E. 12th St. until 3/22.

Also for those in the Bay Area, it'll be screening at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival on 3/17 in San Francisco and on 3/24 in San Jose. Again, I highly recommend this documentary to all.

There's a show called iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel that I highly recommend. The most recent one was Samuel L. Jackson on Bill Russell. I had no idea how cool Bill Russell is. And pretty funny too. Best quote (Bill Russel quoting his father - roughly paraphrased);


If a man asks you for $5 worth of work a day, give him $7. This causes two good things to happen:

1. They need you more than you need them.

2. If you need to, you can look any man straight in the eye and tell him to go to hell.


Love that.

Cocaine Cowboys was excellent...

There is a great docu on famous director Akira Kurosawa (Rashoman, 7th Samurai, Yojimbo, etc.) Kurosawa

Come to think of it, there was another excellent docu on one of my other fav directors... Kubrik

The Devil's Playground.

It's about the Amish in during their running around time before joining the church. Doesn't sound interesting, but because they haven't made an oath to their god yet, they party their asses off.
Have 1000 kid parties in their Dad's barn. He looks the other way. Drive cars, hot rods. Sell meth to get the money to party and enjoy life while they can before they joing the church...
It totally changed the way I looked at the Amish.
Also, they are completely technilogically illiterate when they first join regular society which can be funny as [censored].

http://imdb.com/title/tt0293088/

The movie poster alone is pretty [censored] cool.

Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story the story of former middleweight champion boxer Emile Griffith.

His most notorious rival, a very macho Cuban named Benny "The Kid" Paret, taunted Griffith because of his "alleged" sexual preference before their 3rd fight with each other. Griffith then beat him to death on live TV in the 13th round. This was the first time the US public watched someone die in a boxing ring.

The film examines the circumstances and characters involved in the story.

great link,thanks for that

Not one mention of the French 911 docu? I thought this was excellent.

Fog of war and Paradise lost are both great.

bump

I enjoyed PBS' documentary on the Mormons.

Finally opened The World At War box I've had for few months.

This mammoth comes on 16 discs. I watched the first three discs yesterday and so far it seems amazing.

One important fact is that it's from 1974 when lots of the WWII participants were still alive and available for interview.
wiki

IMDB (highest score I've seen there)

Yes Men - this is by far my favorite documentary. It's about two guys who impersonate WTO officials and are invited to speak to academics and other global-business type individuals. They give insane but brilliant speeches and the response they get is unreal. They call themselves "Identity Correction Agents" (I think) where instead of stealing someone's identity to commit fraud, they correct someone's identity who's essentially perpetuating a fraud.

The Capitalist Conspiracy - It presents facts from original sources like Philip Dru, Tragedy and Hope and Norman Dodd's Hidden Agenda interview. Regardless of what you think on conspiracy theories or how the world works, reading the works of Colonel House, Carroll Quigley and the testimony of Norman Dodd present an intriguing perspective. That is, that ultra wealthy men (i.e. their foundations) have used great amounts of capital to further a Utopian dream of world peace. Early on they determined the greatest way to change society is through war, thus they infiltrated the State Dept and allegedly incited wars as a means to their noble end goal. The first President to adhere to this ideology was Wilson (essentially House himself), the second was FDR and the third was the greatest ever, George W. Bush. (see Colonel House's Philip Dru)

Awesome documentary. I have this on video and have watched it numerous times in addition to times I've seen it played on PBS. It definitely sets the standard for WW II documentaries. I have never seen a documentary about WW II that can compare. It really looks at he human side of the war as well as the historical side.

wide awake --currently playing on hbo , watched this a couple nights ago at like 3am , and i loved it (probably because im an insomniac, myself) , its about a guy who is trying to figure out why he is an insomniac and if he can/want to change his sleeping habits ...

I'm really enjoying the VH1 Classic Albums series. Some of them are very interesting.

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet (saw Endless Summer and Riding Giants), but Billabong Odyssesy is a pretty awesome surf doc.

Step Into Liquid is my fave surf documentary.

Pumping Iron isn't quite a true documentary but damn its good.

Running on the Sun: The Badwater 135 -- directed by Mel Stuart, this movie chronicles the 1999 Badwater 135 ultramarathon, probably the most grueling of all races, held in Death Valley every July. It starts 283 feet below sea level and ascends to nearly 9,000 feet, and the temperatures are as high as 125 degrees. Stuart follows several of the competitors, age 29 to 67, including two amputees, showing their pre-race training methods and the trials they face during the race. It's interesting to see that some of the older runners fare better, due to their mental strength. I never get tired of watching this.

Touch the Sound -- this documents Evelyn Glennie, the first and perhaps only full-time solo percussionist in western culture. She's a Grammy award winner in classical music and has also recorded with Bjork, Steve Hackett, and others. The film shows her in a number of settings: solo in Grand Central Station, on the street, in Japan, and extensively with Fred Frith. She is profoundly deaf and "hears" through her feet and the rest of her body. If you're a musician, or even if you're not, you have to see this.

Don't know if it's been mentioned but i found The falling man to be real good. It's about the picture of the man falling from WTC that caused such outrage at the time.

Picture: as a link, in case some of you are offended by it.

Endless summer This movie got a special place in my heart.

The King of Kong - I saw this movie because my friend worked on it and it turned out to be really interesting. It's about the competition for the world record on the arcade classic Donkey Kong. It features two men vying for the record- one a former video game whiz kid from the 80's turned restaurateur/hot sauce mogul and an unemployed engineer who becomes a grade school teacher. These two fall perfectly into hero and villain roles. One would be hard pressed to write a script that played out as well as this story did. I met the producer and he explained how fortunate they were that basically fell in his lap as the story was starting to develop. I saw it at SXSW film festival, I think it'll have a wider release in mid August. Definitely worth seeing if you get the chance, especially if for those that might have some nostalgia from the 80's or any interest in arcade games.
imdb link

High Score - While I'm on the subject of video game documentaries this was another interesting one I saw at SXSW the year before. This centers around the game Missile Command, and is about one man's setbacks in his attempt to set the marathon record for the game (something like 80 hours of straight play, no breaks). The gamer was at SXSW and seemed like a surprisingly normal guy, both in the doc and in real life.
imdb link

Having only a marginal interest in video games these films were both still very intriguing to me, and I now know more than I ever wanted to know about the world of competitive gaming.

Children Underground : Filmed in 2001 in Romania. Follows the lives of a bunch of really young runaway kids/orphans living in a Bucarest subway station. Amazing but very disturbing documentary.