EWB Film Club

[Mx. Canadian Destroyer]

Documentaries is fun. 

A few recommendations. If you haven't watched Searching For Sugarman, it's my top pick. Such a great movie. It's about a failed American musician who became a huge hit in South Africa as anthems against the apartheid. The movie tries to figure out what happened to him. Top stuff.

I watched The Barkley Marathons  a little while ago. Fun, quirky documentary about this insane marathon where only really the guy who created it knows the route. There are all these silly rules about how to enter it and prove you ran the course correctly. 

The Imposter is also great. A conman tricks a family into believing he is their child who was kidnapped years earlier. 

If you want to be absolutely kicked in the guts, you can also watch Dear Zachary. A man is killed by his ex-girlfriend while pregnant with his child. His best friend begins to create a video for the unborn son to tell the story of his father. Heart-wrenching, but an absolutely fantastic documentary.

[GoGo Yubari]

My doc recommendation would be Hoop Dreams.

And if we're set on that as the theme, I'm going Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

[Monkey D. Lars]

Hoop Dreams is freaking amazing. 

[LittleDaniel]

Watch Dear Zachary but be warned it is quite sad and you really shouldn't look up anything else about it because it will ruin the experience of watching it for the first time.

[MDK]

If we are going with docs then I would suggest Next Goal Wins. Its about the American Samoa football team but as much as its about football its also about the players and its really captivating. It could bring a tear to a glass eye. And Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict is a really tragic film. Its on youtube so its easy to watch.

[Benjamin]

If we're going with purely docs, then yeah, Hoop Dreams is absolutely incredible. I thought a documentary from 2000 onwards would be fun, though, as the style of documentary has changed so much since then. Some I would recommend:

Delivery Us from Evil (2006) - A documentary about Oliver O'Grady, the Catholic priest who abused tons of kids, with interviews with the victims as well as a fucking creepy interview with O'Grady himself. 

The Act of Killing (2012) & The Look of Silence (2014) - Two films that go together about the Indonesian killings in the 60's by the Indonesian army, it's fucking chilling and really, really makes you feel funny afters. Like, not in a good way funny.

Blackfish (2013) - Absolutely one of my favorite movies ever, it's about SeaWorld and their cruel way of treating their animals.

Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) - If you like Nirvana, and you want something that is not a traditional documentary, this is a very trippy one. Lots of home footage inside the Cobain / Love home.

Beyond the Flood (2016) - It's a pretty recent one, about climate change, with DiCaprio as the center of the film, where he goes to all these absolutely beautiful places and talks about how climate change is affecting it. Pretty controversial parts about carbon tax, as well, IMO.

I think I might watch The Wolfpack (2015), a movie about a family who homeschooled their kids in NYC and those kids learned about the world through the movies they watched on TV.

 

[C-MIL]

I watched one called Winnebago Man. It's the story of a guy who was hired to film a commercial for Winnebagos and his angry outtakes of it went viral. He gets humiliated, disappears from society and a documentary filmmaker seeks him out and ends up in a weird way bringing him back. It was thought-provoking, though I don't think intentionally. It only briefly and lightly touches on how cyberbullying can ruin lives, though it's careful to hit that point, but at its core it's the story of a guy who has very clearly intentionally isolated himself and another guy bringing all the notoriety that he's trying to escape right back to him in kind of an unfair way. However, it works because the guy's such an attention-seeking wacky character than when he's finally drawn back into the world, it feels like a real victory. I have not had great luck flying blind into these categories, but I really liked this one.

[Benjamin]

Watched Audrie & Daisy (2016), a Netflix documentary about rape victims Audrie Potts and Daisy Coleman. It's seriously sad, feels like just a record of something that will never change in society. It's about sexual assaults of these two teenage girls from different parts of America, and how social media and their high school and the people surrounding them became divided and how it affected the girls when they reported it. I see this type of rape culture everyday, and I didn't like that they sort of attribute it to just small town America when it's prevalent in every part of the world. Was done seriously well, though, they had this really cool animation styles for interviews with some of the sexual offenders that were kept anonymous, the ones who were still juveniles. The ending, showing the graduation of both girls' schools, was pretty bittersweet. Really worth checking out, but you just kind of hate the world even more after it's done.

[Monkey D. Lars]

I went for The Class of '92 (2013). Liked it a lot. God I miss Paul Scholes on the pitch!

[MalaCloudy Black]

Documentaries are my bread and butter. My Netflix queue is like, 25% "someone told me this is good so I'll watch it, eventually" and 75% documentaries. 

For this I watched Holy Hell, a feature about the filmmaker - Will Allen - 's life as a member of the Buddhafield cult for over 20 years. Allen's forced to leave his home in the mid 80s when he comes out to his parents, and he's invited by his sister to join an "alternative community" in West Hollywood that she was a member of. He was the group leader's personal documentarian for most of his adult life, as well as their "propaganda minister", and most of the film is made up of old footage that he shot from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s as well as interviews with past members of the cult. It deals with the sexual and psychological abuse the cult's leader inflicted on most of them, and the fallout of that. I'd definitely recommend it, it's on the US version of Netflix. Worth a watch. 

I also watched Rich Hill, about a pair of cousins who return to their hometown and document the lives of three boys who live there. They each have their own set of problems - a mother in prison, an agoraphobic mother, a boy abandoned by his father at the age of 6 who is diagnosed with the likes of bipolar disorder, ADD, OCD, etc. - and the film also deals with their hopes, dreams, and everyday living for them in a rural Southern town. It's also on US Netflix and 100% worth seeing. 

The Square is also phenomenal, it details the "Egyptian Crisis", beginning with the revolution in 2011 in Tahrir Square. 

Happy is one that I've kept in my watchlist. It's a relatively short documentary about happiness, and what makes people really happy. 


Also there's one on Netflix that just got added a few months ago - last month or the month before, I don't remember - called Lucha Mexico. It's only got 2 1/2 stars, but I'll still probably watch it.

[Your Mom]

The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? Was certainly something. Jon Peters the producer I guess who was trying to make it was such a tool. He's the guy Kevin Smith talked about who wanted the giant spider and all that. Who knows if any of that is true Peters denies it but he really had no idea what he was doing here. I am sure he was involved in some decent movies but he didn't get comics at all. Superman fighting Ninjas? Brainiac fighting Polar Bears. These are all real things. He also used to come by and harass the artists and practice karate moves on them or something. I don't know what that guys problem was.

It was interesting to see what could have been but it looked like it would have been a horrible movie honestly.

[Mx. Canadian Destroyer]

So I watched Lost for Life. I told my friend that I was doing a Film Club thing and the theme was documentaries, so she said she had just watched it. 

Well, that hit me pretty hard. The doc is about young offenders who get life without parole. My brother was a juvenile who committed a crime and was tried as an adult. The scenes about their family members especially hit home pretty hard. 

Might need to watch Happy now.

[I Don't Mind]

I've tried watching it a few times but fully committed to watching The Dwarvenaut on Netflix. Documentary about an Asian-American man who makes miniature figurines, sculptures, and in-depth playable landscapes for Dungeons and Dragons games. The film follows him as he tries to get funding for his latest set, but the stakes of this fall pretty hard into the background as he more goes into the day-to-day routine of his work, talking about the community of D&D players and their conventions, and a lot of his upbringing. It wasn't a good documentary, but it was what I was looking for. I wanted to watch a doc about D&D and that's what I got. I just had to endure him being a genuine portrayal of every stereotype of DnD players, from fashion sense, to social skills, to the more positive stereotype of creativity. His work is very good and having sat through what was pretty much an hour and a half commercial for his work, I did want to buy some even though I've never played D&D before. So I'm not saying check out The Dwarvenaut, but I hope anyone who thought about watching it has a good idea of what they're in for.

[MDK]

5 hours ago, I DDT 'Em. said:

The Dwarvenaut

I was hoping this would be about a midget in space  

[GoGo Yubari]

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) was a great movie to break in my new 60" TV with. It's about an 85-year-old sushi chef who runs one of the best sushi restaurants in the world, which happens to be in a subway station in Tokyo and only seats ten people, and it manages to cover a ton of things just by profiling him and the people in his general orbit (his two sons who are also sushi chefs, the people who serve as his apprentices, the dealers he buys fish/rice/etc. from). As someone who is terminally bad at committing to anything, it was really amazing just watching people who have gotten amazing at something through tireless hard work and repetition, and there's this constant drive for perfection displayed by almost everyone in the movie that's kind of inspiring.

The craziest part is that I decided to check Wikipedia to see if he's finally retired yet and left the business to his older son. He hasn't. He's 91 now and he still runs his sushi restaurant. That's fucking insane.

[Jimmy]

Gonna give everyone, including myself, until the end of the day to get a documentary in as this one didn't start until Sunday. 

We can prep the next one though: @Cloudy, get thinking! 

[MalaCloudy Black]

It was between John Hughes films or coming of age films. I realize there's an overlap there too. I couldn't choose so I left it up to an Irish Hobo. 

So we'll do coming of age films.

[Benjamin]

7 hours ago, GoGo Yubari said:

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) was a great movie to break in my new 60" TV with. It's about an 85-year-old sushi chef who runs one of the best sushi restaurants in the world, which happens to be in a subway station in Tokyo and only seats ten people, and it manages to cover a ton of things just by profiling him and the people in his general orbit (his two sons who are also sushi chefs, the people who serve as his apprentices, the dealers he buys fish/rice/etc. from). As someone who is terminally bad at committing to anything, it was really amazing just watching people who have gotten amazing at something through tireless hard work and repetition, and there's this constant drive for perfection displayed by almost everyone in the movie that's kind of inspiring.

The craziest part is that I decided to check Wikipedia to see if he's finally retired yet and left the business to his older son. He hasn't. He's 91 now and he still runs his sushi restaurant. That's fucking insane.

I mean, that movie's good and all, but have you seen Juan Likes Rice & Chicken? Now that's a movie about perfection 

1 hour ago, Cloudy said:

It was between John Hughes films or coming of age films. I realize there's an overlap there too. I couldn't choose so I left it up to an Irish Hobo. 

So we'll do coming of age films.

Well, I just finished Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), does that count? It's another amazing film by Richard Linklater, who combines his crazy weird love for assembling an awesome sountrack with how the early 80's changed music and fashion, but still kept the tempo of what being a young male was from his Dazed and Confused days. I fucking loved it. It definitely reminded me a lot of my college days, and how you go from being the oldest and best in whatever you were into days, back into redefining yourself and trying to figure out who you are. It also addresses the fucked up-ness of college of being simultaneously a kid and an adult at the same time.I loved it.

[MDK]

6 hours ago, Cloudy said:

coming of age films.

Oh no  

[C-MIL]

If anybody still needs to cross off a documentary (or has about ten minutes to burn), there's this:

Matt Gourley lives out his lifelong dream of being murdered movie-style. Nothing revolutionary, but I'm a sucker for any story where somebody gets to live out a childhood fantasy.