Your Favorite Documentaries

[Martina]

I just watched a Frontline episode -- aired October 9th. It's about Obama and Romney, and it's super good. It's called The Choice 2012.

[Hollylane]

Originally Posted by Girl_On_Fire

The Beautiful Truth

I didn't see this one mentioned. This film talks about The Gerson Miracle for curing cancer. It's an amazing, touching film that explains the truth behind the cause of most illnesses and how to cure them naturally and it's all told through the eyes of a teenager doing a home-school project. Very sobering and eye-opening.

Thank you! I just found it on Netflix and added it to my instant list!

Originally Posted by Martina

I just watched a Frontline episode -- aired October 9th. It's about Obama and Romney, and it's super good. It's called The Choice 2012.

This looks interesting...Thank you for the link Martina!


I finally had an opportunity to watch Forks Over Knives...Eyeopening, yet, somehow I think I already knew all of this instinctively. Great film!

[Hollylane]

If you're teetering on the edge of becoming a vegan or vegetarian, this documentary is for you...This one was one of several that have tipped the scales for me...I will no longer be eating/using animal products...


Vegucated:




Part sociological experiment and part adventure comedy, Vegucated follows three meat- and cheese-loving New Yorkers who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. Lured by tales of weight lost and health regained, they begin to uncover the hidden sides of animal agriculture that make them wonder whether solutions offered in films like Food, Inc. go far enough. This entertaining documentary showcases the rapid and at times comedic evolution of three people who discover they can change the world one bite at a time.

[Kobi]

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to affect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person.

One theme is its assessment as a "personality", as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite led to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Topics addressed include:
- the Business Plot, where in 1933, General Smedley Butler exposed an alleged corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons;

-Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex;

-economic externalities;

-suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station;

-the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany;

-the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust);

-the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation;

- in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

- most disturbing to me, how the corporate scientific corporations are "buying" the rights to human and other species genes.


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Best watched in pieces to catch all the overt and covert messaging. Freakin scary stuff when you realize how deeply they are shaping the people we are and the world we live in.

[Greyson]

Wish Me Away
A personal and intimate look at Chely Wright, the first country music star to come out as openly gay. The documentary charts her pursuit and rise to fame in Nashville, a hidden network of secrets and lies, her emotional unraveling and eventual rebirth.

This documentary is going to premiere on Showtime this Thursday, November 15th, @ 8PM EST/PST.

[Words]

Saw this one a couple of nights ago and would highly recommend (absolutely agree with Ishiguro)....

London, England, Nov 30, 2010 / 02:54 am (CNA).- A “breathtaking” film recording the life of Carmelite nuns at a London monastery took the grand prize at the International Festival of Cinema and Religion in Italy.

Director Michael Whyte’s documentary “No Greater Love” examines the cloistered nuns of the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill. Though centered upon Holy Week, the film covers a year in the life of the monastery and its daily rhythms of Divine Office and work.

The nuns are members of the Discalced Order of Carmelites and live without television, radio or newspapers. They maintain silence throughout the day except for two periods of recreation.

The film follows a year in which one woman professes as a novice and one of the senior nuns dies. The movie is primarily observational but interviews several nuns about their life, their faith, their moments of doubt and their belief in the power of prayer.

Writer Kazuo Ishiguro has said the film “looks breathtaking, like various Dutch Masters come to life.”

The International Jury of the International Festival of Cinema and Religion called the film “beautifully crafted” and “a powerful message for those of us who inhabit fast societies that militate against the possibility of wisdom.”

“No Greater Love” was released in the U.K. on April 9, 2010 and was scheduled to be released in Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg in November. It will be released in France on Dec. 29.

The film’s website is http://www.nogreaterlove.co.uk/.

[*Anya*]

Four documentaries in HBO’s series on photojournalism.

Photographers Amid Chaos

Absolutely riveting (very worth looking for after the series on HBO if you do not have HBO)

By MIKE HALE
Published: November 4, 2012

“Witness: Juarez,” the first in a series of four HBO documentaries about contemporary war photographers, is the visual equivalent of a fast-paced duet, like Mozart for still camera and video camera rather than violin and viola. The photographer Eros Hoagland and the cinematographer Jared Moossy travel the deadly streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in tandem, and our view jumps between their lenses; their photographs and moving images echo and amplify one another.

The photographer Eros Hoagland is the subject of the first, “Witness: Juarez.”
The half-hour “Juarez,” a bracing, at times mesmerizing introduction to the “Witness” series, a project of the filmmaker Michael Mann and the documentarian David Frankham, who directed three of the films.

Mr. Frankham’s contributions are “Juarez” and “Rio,” about Mr. Hoagland, and “South Sudan,” with the French photojournalist Véronique de Viguerie; Abdallah Omeish directed “Witness: Libya,” which features Michael Christopher Brown.

The subsequent films are each an hour long, and while all have powerful material, particularly the South Sudan chapter.

Mr. Hoagland, a freelancer who works frequently for The New York Times, tracks down the scenes of drug-related murders in Ciudad Juárez with the help of a Mexican photographer, Guillermo Arias, and also embeds with the Mexican police, a practice he defends as “a free ride to a place we couldn’t go alone because we’d be killed.”

He offers practical tips — “You don’t want to arrive too soon, because the gunmen are still going to be there” — as well as philosophical guidelines. After he and Mr. Moossy (who photographed all four documentaries) race to the scene of a shooting and film the victim as he staggers out of his car, calling for help and dying on the street as soldiers and police officers stand by, Mr. Hoagland says: “I wasn’t there to mourn for him. I wasn’t there to console his family. I wasn’t there to — I was there to document it. It’s a piece of history.”

Mr. Hoagland’s comment that getting “too hung up on emotions” would make his work suffer — “I have to use that shield as much as I can” — takes on an extra resonance when you know that his father, John Hoagland, was killed in El Salvador in 1984 while taking photographs for Newsweek. (The photographer played by John Savage in Oliver Stone’s film “Salvador” was based on John Hoagland.)

In “Witness: Libya” Mr. Brown revisits his own direct brush with death: He was wounded by the mortar round that killed his colleagues Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in 2011. His chilling narration of the photographers’ movements that day is delivered at the scene, with current shots of blasted buildings and scarred pavement interwoven with videos and photos taken right up to the moment of the blast and in its aftermath.

The overall subject of “Libya” is the chaotic situation there in the wake of the 2011 revolution, with various factions fighting for power and revenge, and the film reflects that chaos. Images like the charred remains of the convoy that carried Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi when he was captured or an ammunition depot where stacked crates of missiles and bombs sit unguarded, are undeniably powerful. But the interviews and scenes of protests and confrontations that take up the bulk of the hour don’t cohere into a persuasive picture of the country’s current condition.

What’s more interesting is to see where the approaches of Mr. Brown and Mr. Hoagland agree or diverge. Both express the view that documenting a crisis is less about capturing the violence than about seeing the life around it — “the whole situation that people are living in,” as Mr. Hoagland puts it. But while Mr. Brown talks about the importance of identifying with his subjects — and is seen dancing with a roomful of Libyan militiamen — Mr. Hoagland reiterates the value of standing apart. “I’m not there to tell you what’s happening,” he says. “I’m there to show you what I saw, what happened to me, and then you can come upon your own conclusions.”

Witness

HBO, Monday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Produced by Blue Light Media and Little Puppet. Michael Mann and David Frankham, executive producers; Eros Hoagland, Michael Christopher Brown and Véronique de Viguerie, photojournalists; Jared Moossy, cinematographer; Antonio Pinto, composer. “Witness: Juarez”: Directed by Mr. Frankham; Ike Martin, Alison Kunzman and Youree Henley, producers. “Witness: Libya”: Directed by Abdallah Omeish; Julie Herrin and Josiah Hooper, producers. “Witness: South Sudan” and “Witness: Rio”: Directed by Mr. Frankham; Mr. Herrin and Mr. Hooper, producers.

A version of this review appeared in print on November 5, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition of the New York Times, with the headline: Photographers Amid Chaos.

http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/art...ers.html?_r=1&

[RNguy]

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

You gotta see it to believe it
Like watching a train wreck you don't want to watch but can't turn it off .
Gotta love some Boone county WV folk

[*Anya*]

Showtime's current series: "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States".

Right now watching: "Johnson, Nixon & Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune".

Wow. Learned quite a few things I never knew from newspapers or history books (as I have from other episodes and time periods in the series).

I recommend the series highly.

[nycfem]

Dragged BB to "West of Memphis" on Christmas, a doc follow up to another great doc "Paradise Lost."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Memphis