Tabe Posted November 3, 2014 Share Posted November 3, 2014 A couple more Netflix docs for me: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage - Good official band-produced documentary tracking the entire career of the band Rush. They start from the very beginning and cover the whole thing in sections and do a very nice job of it. Lots of terrific archival footage and recordings. Each guy is interviewed extensively and they seem to be pretty open about stuff. All the key points of their career are covered nicely. They spend a decent amount of time talking about Neil Peart's famous shunning of fan meet & greets and autograph requests. They also spend a lot of time talking about the hiatus the band took when Neil lost his daughter and wife just 10 months apart. Peart hopped on his motorcycle and rode around for 2 years, driving 55,000 miles in an effort to work out his grief. They also spend a nice amount of time talking about style conflicts in the band in the 80s and 90s as Geddy Lee started using more and more keyboards in their music. Some negatives? Well, there's almost no time spent on personal lives except where it impacts the band (Peart). Lee throws in a "and my wife and kids" comment offhandedly - before that, no mention of his family at all. Also, they spend a fair amount of time trying to defend themselves and their lyrics as not pretentious. Sorry guys, they are and they're full of pseudo-symbolism. Not all the time certainly but...yeah. Own it - it's really OK. Also as part of the doc, they include interviews with other musicians and...Jack Black. Yeah, I get it, he's in a band. But, seriously, the guy is a douchenozzle who detracts from the film. That said, these guys seem like really nice dudes who enjoy working together. They might be the most "normal" rock stars I've ever seen. 8/10. (Lots of fun clips from the band's music videos are also included. Hoooo boy, these guys made some rotten videos...) Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story - Michael Morton was convicted in the 1980s of bludgeoning his wife to death. Central to his conviction was medical testimony that his wife died in the middle of the night - when Morton was still home. Turns out that evidence was unreliable. And that Morton's kid told the police of a "monster" who came in the house and hit his mom. And lots of other stuff. Morton's case was picked up by The Innocence Project (a group that does amazing work in overturning wrongful convictions) and he eventually had his conviction set overturned on the basis of DNA evidence. That DNA led to the conviction of the actual killer. And, amazingly for this type of case, the prosecutor who sent Morton to jail actually did some jail time for his actions. That's incredibly rare. What we get are interviews with Morton and the folks on his side, as well as some of his fellow inmates, as they walk us through the various stages of his case. Good stuff and well done. Morton has an amazingly upbeat look at his life. We should all be so forgiving. Not quite a must-see but this doc was really, really good. 9/10. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted November 3, 2014 Share Posted November 3, 2014 That Rush doc is great. They probably didn't include a lot of family stuff because the guys are pretty normal and none of that would be very interesting to talk about. I like how they dug into the archives and pulled out all those bad reviews for an interesting discussion on the band's populist nature as well as their inherent nerdiness being like double wolfsbane to rock writers. All the musicians have really interesting things to say... except for Jack Black, of course. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Execproducer Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 Drop whatever you are doing and watch An Honest Liar right now! James Randi is one of my heroes in life and this doc proves that anyone can be fooled for real. It is a history of debunkery, an expose on how a truth-teller reacts when they have to face their own truth, and a love story all wrapped in one. It rules. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic is fucking great. If you have Showtime Networks in your cable package, watch this now! If there is a glaring omission in the documentary it is a lack of content dwelling on Pryor's partnership with Gene Wilder. I know that they were strictly professional collaborators, but there should've been a more in-depth look at that particular sub-section of Pryor's work. You could make the argument that working with Wilder on Silver Streak was the point in Pryor's career where he successfully crossed over into mainstream cinema. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 I wish we could get a George Carlin doc as in-depth as Omit the Logic, that would rule. We have that, we have the Lenny Bruce doc, we have the awesome Bill Hicks doc, but nothing about Carlin. Weird. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rainmakerrtv Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 The director of the Rush documentary, Sam Dunn, made an awesome doc called Metal : A Headbanger's Journey. I reccommend it to anyone who is interested in music. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cliff Hanger Posted November 5, 2014 Share Posted November 5, 2014 Man, backtracking thru this whole thread I really want to see Electric a Boogaloo when it finishes the festival circuit and drops for general availability. I was a preteen during Cannon's heyday, and we loved the shit out of some Chuck Norris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted November 5, 2014 Share Posted November 5, 2014 As I lifelong metalhead I second the love for A Headbanger's Journey and add that his Metal Evolution series was interesting... except for the fact that VH1 Classic buried the "Extreme Metal" episode which was the most important one they could have aired. Luckily you can find that on Youtube. Fuck VH1. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted November 6, 2014 Share Posted November 6, 2014 Another documentary: Ecstasy of Order - The Tetris Masters - This is a documentary following one man's attempt to put together a tournament whose goal is to crown a world champion of "classic Tetris" - that is, the Nintendo version of the game for the NES. You can take issue with the "world champion" portion of it - nobody from outside the US is involved - but that's really the only knock. We meet several players and their respective talents and techniques are discussed in fine detail. We get some fun archival footage of the 1990 Nintendo World Championship - at which Tetris played a prominent role and the organizer of this tournament competed. The players speak reverently of the almost-mythical player "Thor" - yes that's his actual name - who won the title in 1990. They are in awe of his talent and wonder whether he'll compete this time around. We get to meet Thor as well. And they discuss the difficulties of this particular version of Tetris. And then we get the actual competition, which might be the least-interesting part of the doc. What's really cool is that the players all seem to be nice. They seem to genuinely like and respect each other. They might all be (somewhat) socially awkward or whatever but they seem to be pleasant to be around. All in all, this is a well-done documentary on easily the most-popular video game of all-time. Well worth watching. And we get a great payoff at the end. 9/10. p.s. In watching the doc, it occurred to me that Tetris has been on pretty much every platform ever. Hell, I've even written my own version of it (a pretty good version, I might add). Every platform except the two current ones - XB1 and PS4 - that is. Wonder how long it'll be before we get versions for those platforms... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted November 7, 2014 Share Posted November 7, 2014 Next up: Bet Raise Fold - The Story of Online Poker - Documentary that follows a couple of online poker players and, through them, seeks to tell the story of the rise of online poker. They do a good job of that, highlighting the major players in the market. They buy into the "gee, it was just SOOOO easy to make money" narrative that's taken hold for the 2003-2007 period and so we get lots of players telling us just that. There's some discussion on the mental aspects - handling swings in bankroll, dealing with family, etc. And then lots of discussion on the 2011 "Black Friday" when the poker sites got shut down and player assets frozen. This portion of the story is very well-told and is especially infuriating to me (as a former online poker player*). They also spend time on the scandal surrounding the fraud committed by the Full Tilt Poker guys and how all but the non-player CEO got away scot-free (basically). The documentary isn't perfect - it mentions cheating as a concern for playing but then ignores the huge scandal involving Ultimate Poker and the cheating done there. Still, it's really good and makes me long for the days when I could play online. 9/10. * - I was fortunate in that the state of Washington passed a law that explicitly made it illegal to play online poker months before Black Friday. I was able to cash out my balance and completely avoid the mess created by the mass shutdown. It's 3-1/2 years and there are STILL people who haven't gotten paid by Full Tilt Poker... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted November 8, 2014 Share Posted November 8, 2014 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted November 10, 2014 Share Posted November 10, 2014 Another documentary: Good Game - Documentary covering professional gaming, specifically StarCraft 2 and Team Evil Geniuses. Promising premise but bad execution. It's a sloppy mess structure-wise with no clear direction of what the movie is trying to do. That's combined with bad technical execution that includes not using off-camera microphones for interview subjects, so everybody sounds really hollow. In the end, this is a big disappointment. 4/10. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RIPPA Posted November 12, 2014 Author Share Posted November 12, 2014 OH MY GOD! SOMEONE TOOK MANNY PACQUIAO AND LIAM NEESON IS GOING TO GO GET HIM!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Austin Posted November 13, 2014 Share Posted November 13, 2014 OH MY GOD! SOMEONE TOOK MANNY PACQUIAO AND LIAM NEESON IS GOING TO GO GET HIM!!! This is something I'd take my mom to see. She loves Pacquiao, and our family friends always holds parties for his fights. There's a lot of truth to the impact he's made on the Filipino community. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hammerva Posted November 14, 2014 Share Posted November 14, 2014 Saw this on my Hulu Movies section. Apparently there was another Penn State documentary in 2013 chronicling the full 2011 year created by someone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RIPPA Posted November 14, 2014 Author Share Posted November 14, 2014 Yeah - I posted it in the upcoming movie thread a week or so ago when I spaced about this thread which I had started. I suck... Of course Pos is on there clearly defending Joe Pa because gotta sell that book Joe! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolfan in NYC Posted November 14, 2014 Share Posted November 14, 2014 Two topics I'll guarantee are not mentioned in that movie: 1) Same sex marriage 2) Floyd Mayweather Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted November 18, 2014 Share Posted November 18, 2014 Another weekend, another video game documentary: Free to Play - Valve-produced documentary covering the DOTA 2 world championship tournament from...2012 or 2013. Not sure. They probably said and I missed it. Anyway, this is a well-produced documentary with nice production values. They focus on about half a dozen players from around the world and follow them at the tournament and at home. Some great stuff, with one guy whose parents basically tell him he's an idiot for playing all the time and that he used to get good grades, while he pines away thinking that winning the tournament will get him back his ex-girlfriend. Lots of talk about the viability of professional gaming as a career and then some pretty good coverage of the tournament itself. I don't play DOTA 2 - I haven't played a game on my PC since before I got my PS3 four years ago - but I was able to follow what was going on with no trouble. In the end, this is a "safe" documentary, given that it was done by the company who makes the game, but it was still good. I'm gonna say it's right at the Tabedoza Line - 7/10. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RIPPA Posted December 5, 2014 Author Share Posted December 5, 2014 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 That reminds me -- and we may have talked about this here already -- but Jiro Dreams of Sushi is an amazing documentary. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolfan in NYC Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 Great, now I want Chinese food. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 I always thought it was "invented" by the father of the girl who was in The Big Hit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Another documentary: Video Games: The Movie - Zach Braff produced this, the latest "history of video games" documentary. I've been studying the history of video games for literally 30 years so the likelihood of me learning anything in these documentaries is really, really low. I don't care. I'm looking for good footage, nice insights and for the story to be well told. This one...has some nice footage. It's otherwise a big mess. They jump all over the place with constant side track diversions into other stuff. One second they're talking about early video games, the next they're going into a detailed explanation of pixels, color depths and so on. Stupid. Some nice interviews from industry folks - just ignore the typos on their job descriptions. In the end, they leap all over the place, skip over the Sega Genesis entirely, and it all ends up a big disappointment. But, hey, they did find an Odyssey commercial that once and for all dispels the notion that Magnavox implied in any way that the Odyssey only worked on Magnavox TVs. 4/10. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig H Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 Watching Cocaine Cowboys Reloaded and the ENDLESS background music is so annoying. It. Never. Ends. I like Billy Corben a lot, but goddamn is it frustrating to watch this without the awful background music. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADCAP Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 Watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi yesterday. I can't state how much I loved this movie. The mans' pursuit of perfection is so engaging that I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I respect the discipline that he has and it was good to see on the surface at least, that his sons didn't have an adverse reaction to his strictness. Even though the movie doesn't really delve into his past(the most I think he really told us was that his father put him out of the house at age nine to fend for himself), I didn't even really think about that until after the movie was over. Highly recommended. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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