documentaries – Yesterday's Movies

Borat

June 17, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I remember this movie as something widely loved when I was in college, even though it came out a little before I began. There was also some kind of controversy about the real people in the movie being upset at being fooled into looking ridiculous.

A few years ago there was a streaming movie comedy where the scripted plot was written around setting up hidden camera pranks on bystanders called Bad Trip, and I thought it was the first scripted fiction/prank hybrid movie, but it seems that at the time I forgot about Borat. However, the mockumentary format of this movie makes it a bit closer to reality even if the plot is pre-written at least in the broad strokes, so it’s more conventional.

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Bob Roberts

June 10, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I don’t know how well-known this movie is. The only reason I’ve heard about it is because The Simpsons referenced it in an episode title that I only knew because it was the only time I ever heard a TV station announce the episode title as part of saying the show was on next, and it only stuck in my head because it was confusing without knowing the reference. I think at some point I got around to looking up what the reference was and got just enough answer to satisfy me and then I forgot about it until I was looking for mockumentaries and realized I’d already heard of this.

What little discussion I’ve seen around the movie recently is about how the satire has evolved into reality. I hope there’s still a little satire that seems like satire.

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District 9

June 4, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

It’s always surreal to me to be reviewing movies I was aware of and wanted to watch around the time I started doing this. As I limit the regular reviews to “10+ years old” and “first watch”, obviously not much I had a lot of interest in at the time makes it a decade before I get to it.

I’ve heard this is an apartheid story in the guise of an aliens on Earth story. It’s not exactly the most attractive idea to watch a dystopia story where the opressors are humans and the opressed are not. That’s probably why after the hype died down I didn’t make an effort to get back to it.

Anyway, I decided I should do some mockumentaries, and I was surprised to see this come up on a list of them, so I’m taking the opportunity.

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When We Were Kings

April 30, 2023temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

I had heard of the “Rumble in the Jungle” before, but I didn’t really understand it as much more than a trivia question. A sport, two names, and a date. Honestly, whenever I pictured it, something more like the cover to “Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali” came to mind, and that’s all.

I had no idea there was a documentary about it until I went looking for theatrical documentaries. Now that I know, of course there would be a documentary, but I hadn’t heard about it before. Even though it didn’t come out until late enough that I would have been around to hear about the release.

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F For Fake

April 15, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I may have only heard of this film a few days before deciding to add it to my checklist (after thirteen years, I finally made a list that’s not just in my head or bookmarks on a streaming site). I know that it concerns Elmyr De Hory, an art forger so skilled and so prolific that the art market would like to pretend he doesn’t exist, and that it was made by Orson Welles, which caught my attention. Especially when I was looking for older theatrical documentaries, which are surprisingly hard to find recommendations for.

While Orson Welles is highly talked about as an actor and director, it occurs to me that his broadly known legacy doesn’t seem to extend much beyond War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane (and an infamous rant outtake on a frozen pea commercial). I was going to say this isn’t one of his better known works, but then, not much seems to be better known.

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The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

April 8, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I remember hearing about this movie back when it came out, but I didn’t realize at the time that it had just come out. The underlying story is still generating headlines because new developments continue coming out, which I believe is that somebody turned out to have cheated, and that wasn’t known at the time. I haven’t followed the news too closely because I was always slightly interested in getting around to seeing the movie.

It has this reputation of being a big deal documentary for video games, an epic clash of the titans underdog video game story. I’ve seen how documentary crews can gin up events to make stories better, and I’ll be interested in picking apart the story from the truth, or the truth as we know it now.

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Behind the Mask

April 19, 2019temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’m not a very big fan of horror, but I do enjoy a mockumentary, especially a comedic one, and horror is a genre that’s always ripe to be mocked.

I hadn’t heard of this movie before the part of the internet that works in mysterious ways (okay, the mysterious ways governed by data and math) brought it to the surface. It’s a pretty simple premise, as a serial killer to be invites a documentary team to follow him as he plans his blaze of glory, and instead of calling the police or anything, they go get their killer story.

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The Endless Summer

August 25, 2017temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I wouldn’t have thought that surfing would make an interesting topic for a documentary until I saw that this existed. Maybe that’s one of the functions of good documentary film, to highlight things about the world you wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested to learn about. Apparently the director made a series of several surfing docs over ten years, which seems a bit much, but this seems to be considered the best.

I’m hoping to see 95 minutes painting the picture on the poster, living in the world of the 60s surfing scene and memorializing how great it was.

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Best in Show

May 20, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’ve probably been aware of this movie since shortly after it came out. I remember for years seeing it on the shelf at the library, picking it up, and putting it down again. It always looked like something I should be interested in, but it never grabbed me. It’s about a dog show. It’s a mockumentary. It’s by Christopher Guest. And none of that ever really put it over the edge for me, until now.

For an improvisational mockumentary with a huge cast, the only thing I know to expect is that I can’t predict anything.

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Children of the Revolution

March 25, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Ah dangit, some other posters flip the R, but this one flips the N. I was hoping to avoid a bastardization of the Cyrillic alphabet. — Children of the Revolution. Miramar Films 1996.

Before watching the movie:

This just came up in my digital recommendations a few weeks ago. I thought at first it was a documentary because the promotional images really don’t do much to convey that this is a scripted comedy, instead really getting into the cold war aesthetic.

So basically an Australian woman raises Josef Stalin’s love child in the true Party way, and somehow this leads to political disaster in the modern day. My first thought is that it’s another Australian comedy inserting Australians into places in history where they were not (an interesting apparent trend that may not exist outside these two movies, and I could do with more stories of real Australian history), but I’m really looking forward to the journey getting there, especially with a cast of familiar names, some of which I can actually place.

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