documentaries – Yesterday's Movies

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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Lost in La Mancha

February 26, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

For years, Terry Gilliam has wanted to make a Don Quixote movie. And for decades, it’s been in development hell. Except once, it actually went into production. And never came out. This is the story of Terry Gilliam’s impossible dream.

I always thought Gilliam made this documentary himself when production fell apart, but it’s attributed to a couple of other directors. Makes sense, I guess. He’s too busy making weird movies (or at least trying) to make a documentary.

Apparently the title for Gilliam’s movie is The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I always thought it was going to just be Cervantes’s story with a Gilliam bent, but that title sounds like he intended to at least tell a new frame story. I am unfortunately not familiar enough with Quixote to know how the original story ends, but I expect it’s a classical tragedy. So it might yet not be an original story on Gilliam’s part.

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Hoop Dreams

February 19, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This is one of those movies I’ve heard the title bandied about and little else. Perhaps the phrase predated the movie, since I’ve always known it as an idiom rather than a title.

Unfortunately, that gives me very little to go on for comment in this section. It apparently has an incredibly positive reputation, but yet I only came across it by specifically researching documentaries to consider for this month. I know it follows two inner city kids who are trying to get basketball scholarships to lift them out of where they are. Do they compete, or simply run parallel? I couldn’t say. There must be plenty of athletic scholarships out there, but they might be both scouted by one school for one spot. I can see the potential for a powerful portrait of their lives and potential, but I couldn’t guess at much more.

Unrelatedly, anyone who wishes to can now support this blog on Patreon. I promise not to have obtrusive reminders about it, whether it works out or not.

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The Thin Blue Line

February 12, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I understand that this has reenactments. Originally, I was thinking of the technique of historical documentaries putting actors in appropriate dress and marching across a battlefield, sitting at a desk writing, or talking in a group, basically silent illustrations for a narration to play over. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s more like a traditional dramatization, just mixed in with the documentary.

I find the idea of the latter an interesting mix, but kind of disappointing to think that half of my doc selections are more fabricated than a documentary should be.

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