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Post by Deleted on Mar 25, 2016 12:26:17 GMT
I haven't been in this thread for awhile. So many of these I would love to see. Most especially the Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse productions.
I recently viewed a documentary of Nina Simone. Very well done. Powerful in so many ways. It is available on Netflix streaming. Please do see it if you are a Nina fan.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 25, 2016 12:51:10 GMT
Just watched MERU, about Conrad Anker's 3rd attempt to be the first to climb the Sharks Tooth of Mount Meru, a much harder climb than Everest as there are no Sherpas to schlepp your hundreds of pounds of gear. Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk double as climbers and photographers, upping the difficulty (somewhat like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels). There's a lot of backstory and footage of his earlier attempts on MERU, and the unfortunate deaths of Anker's earlier mentors and partners, including his wife's first husband, Alex Lowe.
Now I know how they do it. I also know I would never ever want to do anything like this myself. Though if a helicopter were to drop me on top of this peak, I certainly would enjoy the view.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2016 14:02:11 GMT
I finally saw the sensational documentary Merci Patron about the world of Bernard Arnault, director general of LVMH, the biggest luxury goods company in the world. The filmmaker decided to help one family living in total squalor, the Klurs, in a struggle to be compensated for their situation -- and they won, which makes every moment a joy to watch. The movie has become a huge hit across France (for a documentary), and its popularity is still growing. It struck a particular chord with me, because my great grandparents worked for the textile empire at the origin of the group. Whenever I go to that area of the Vosges, every town still has its abandoned textile factory in ruins along the river. Over the past 30 years, LVMH has discarded everything that it owns that is not a top line luxury item -- such as closing the Samaritaine department store in Paris with 48 hours notice. Rather than creating anything new, the conglomerate just gobbles up existing brands (Dior, Vuitton, Moët Hennessy, Kenzo, Givenchy, Sephora, Tag Heuer, Chaumet, Fendi, Bulgari...) and removes anything cheap. The film has even had the honours of the New York Times.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2016 17:09:51 GMT
Earlier this week I went to see Claire Simon's extraordinary film " Le bois dont les rêves sont faits" (The woods of which dreams are made) about the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. She spent a year in the woods to see all seasons and probably filmed hundreds of hours of material, but the movie "only" lasts 2 and a half hours. It was so fascinating that I wouldn't have minded if it had been double that length. She shows the joggers, cyclists and people simply going for a walk, but she also delves beyond the main paths to talk with the prostitutes, a voyeur, and the people who live hidden away in the woods. One of them was a woman who just picked up and left her home in Brittany and moved into a tent with her son in the woods. She left her daughter with her parents because she was too young for such an adventure. "My son had to hide for the first two years because he was only 16." Her son has moved to a foyer since then "because it has video games and TV." There's also a shaman living in the woods and he even has a sign at his location "the shaman of the Bois de Vincennes" where various hippies and others congregate to play music and meditate. You also get to see a big group of Cambodians having a communal picnic near the pagoda and explaining that the Bois de Vincennes is one of their favourite places because even though they are Buddhists, they are also animists and feel the spirits living in the trees. One man cries as he tells the story of his arrival in Paris to join his father who had fled the Khmer Rouge. His father later returned to Cambodia and he is afraid that he will never see him again. He goes into the Bois de Vincennes because it reminds him of his childhood, when the Khmer Rouge evicted the city dwellers and made them live in the forest. "I feel like I am back at home when I come here." Finally, Claire Simon visits an empty plain where the Free University of Vincennes used to be located. This was a government structure open to all without requiring any qualifications to attend the courses. In fact, it still existed when I moved to Paris. It was created after the events of May 1968 and stayed in Vincennes until 1980 when it moved to Saint Denis. (Rest assured, it is still going strong in Saint Denis as the Université de Vincennes à Saint Denis and has 20,000 students now.) Everybody was disappointed when the film ended, because there was so much more to show...
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 22, 2016 17:54:39 GMT
That's a great recommendation. Sometimes documentaries leave one feeling that too many things weren't addressed. But to have a documentary show and tell -- from many different viewpoints -- why a place is compelling, and to make it so compelling to the audience is a real triumph. Here's a recommendation for some short and fascinating documentaries: The New Yorker Presents on Amazon. Prime is not enough use to me to pay its yearly fee, but I have one of those freebie 30-day memberships to Prime. The best thing about it has been this series, which has introduced me to all kinds of subjects I probably wouldn't have pursued on my own. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/new-yorker-presents-review/463035/
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Post by htmb on Apr 22, 2016 19:55:53 GMT
That might be a good film for me to see this summer on a bad weather day if it's still showing.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2016 6:20:04 GMT
Yesterday I went to see Les Habitants by Raymond Depardon. He is a photojournalist and also one of France's major directors of documentaries. He almost never comments on the action but just sets his camera down and shows what is happening. One of his best movies was Délits Flagrants about the tribunal that hands down immediate verdicts to people arrested for relatively minor crimes. I'm not sure if I remember the procedure correctly, but I think that nobody can be forced to be judged immediately, but if they accept they generally get off more easily, and they don't have a trial hanging in the future in six or nine months. Anyway, that movie was full of absolute belly laughs when you would hear these people explaining the stupid things they did, or having it slowly pried out of them by the court assigned lawyer (who generally had about 10 minutes to study the case). And there were also tragic moments that would have the audience in tears.
This new movie takes place in an old caravan that the director took all over France. He would just park in a town square and find two people willing to continue a conversation already in progress in the caravan in front of his camera. In the closing credits, he thanks the 180 people who accepted to do this, although probably only about 40 or 50 people appear in the film. One woman giving marital advice to another one, two young men talking about their prospects of getting laid, prim old ladies talking about how the world is going to hell... In one funny moment, there were two Muslim girls giving their views on religion.
"What's with this pork business?"
"Well, the Catholics can eat pork because the Pope can rewrite the bible whenever he feels like it. So when society changes, he just puts that in the bible. But the Koran was written 1435 years ago and has never changed because it's not supposed to. But that's why there's so much weird stuff in it."
And there were other conversations that seemed totally innocuous at first and then one person would say to the other one "but you let him beat you for 11 years!"
Anyway, it is just a snapshot of the lives of ordinary people, but I found it fascinating.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 29, 2016 14:22:09 GMT
Even though I can't understand the dialogue, the body language is fascinating.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2016 13:41:10 GMT
I went to see the 3D documentary Ouragan (Hurricane) today and thought it was quite interesting. It follows the birth of a hurricane from Senegal to landfall in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Louisiana. It is semi-fictional because "Hurricane Lucy" is an invented composite of a number of hurricanes; it would be next to impossible to get footage, interviews, destruction, underwater scenes, effects on wildlife, etc. from just one storm. The 3D is pretty impressive, and the film is not overlong, which is good, too.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 9, 2016 14:52:47 GMT
Great trailer. I'm embarrassed to admit that the sight of the little raccoon affected me more than anything else.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 14:21:07 GMT
The Franco-Greek documentary Exotica, Erotica, etc. answered a great number of my questions about travelling on a cargo ship. I was enthralled. I was also alone in the cinema.
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Post by Kimby on Aug 24, 2016 16:32:44 GMT
We just watched "The Salt of the Earth" a photo documentary about a photojournalist who started out as a social issues photographer, documenting mines in Brazil, then covered refugee crises all over the (third) world, then after following the Rwandan refugees from one place to another as their numbers declined from malnutrition, exposure, genocide and eventually just plain collapse of their will to live, became so disillusioned about the human race that he quit taking photos of people and began photographing the earth. The second act of the film follows his and his family's efforts to restore his grandfather's farm, which had been completely deforested by his father who sold the trees to fund his eight children's education, and therefore their futures. The rehabilitation of the land rehabilitates the photographer's spirits as well.
Gorgeous black and white still images by Sabastio Salgado interspersed with color video by the documentary film crew, and an evocative sound track.
Recommended. Though hard to find.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 24, 2016 18:15:00 GMT
More power to you, Kerouac. The clips from the Exotica documentary are dreamlike and beautiful, and the narrative voice is lovely and the content thought-provoking. Unfortunately, I'd have to be of a much more contemplative and patient nature to watch the whole film.
The Salt of the Earth sounds quite interesting, Kimby.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 18:39:32 GMT
More power to you, Kerouac. The clips from the Exotica documentary are dreamlike and beautiful, and the narrative voice is lovely and the content thought-provoking. Unfortunately, I'd have to be of a much more contemplative and patient nature to watch the whole film. I'm sure that the pace of the documentary is one of the reasons that it was kept to a very sage 71 minutes of length. Actually, the excerpts that I linked leave out the most fascinating part of the movie -- the "erotica" of the title. There is narration by old port whores which make them sound like the most tragic and nicest people in the world. They talk about how they felt like queens of sex when these men would arrive in port after weeks of deprivation and that passion would quickly turn into love. They might be in port for a week, which gave the women plenty of time to imagine that the love was real and that the men would not sail off never to be seen again. Near the end of the film, the camera uses both cruelty and tenderness to slowly pan up the naked body of one of these old women, to which the years have obviously not been kind. She says that she regrets that she was never able to have children and that when she sees the ships come into port now full of young sailors, she imagines that they could be her sons or grandsons. "And they would have been of every race in the world," the woman says with extreme nostalgia. There is one scene in the movie where all of the crew are dancing in the common room to Abba's "Dancing Queen" and it also gives the impression -- or confirms the well known fact -- that men at sea do not always wait to get to port to obtain sexual release. In the same room a bit later the Filipino crew pray and thank Jesus for watching over them and having thousands of angels surrounding the ship.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 24, 2016 18:58:20 GMT
Even the excerpts you showed made it seem a very balanced documentary and this further information does make it sound more watchable.
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Post by bjd on Aug 24, 2016 19:05:08 GMT
The Salt of the Earth is great. I saw it at the movies last year. The photographs full screen are wonderful.
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Post by htmb on Aug 24, 2016 20:08:26 GMT
I think I'd like to watch the Salt of the Earth. Here's the trailer.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 24, 2016 20:43:22 GMT
Wow ~ yeah!
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Post by Deleted on Sept 20, 2016 14:22:27 GMT
They finally dragged out Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next here, so I went to see it. Obviously, seen from Europe, one can only be a bit bemused by what he pretends to find incredible, but as usually and in spite of his loutish humour, he does manage to make a few interesting points. However, one sort of longs for something more in depth than a few minutes about Italian paid leave, French school lunches, German labour relations, education in Slovenia and Finland, Norwegian prisons, Portuguese acceptance of drug use and the triumph of feminism in Tunisia and Iceland, etc. But of course he had to go with the lowest common denominator, as usual.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2016 13:13:32 GMT
Today I went to see the Italian documentary about Slab City Below Sea Level. It was actually made in 2008 but was just restored for a new release. I am always fascinated by any mention of Slab City with all of its vagabonds and crazies. This film was actually made over a 5-year period, but the place is so timeless that there is no way to tell. The residents talk about the tragedies that brought them there -- the death of a child seems to be a big reason -- or just total burnout from a "normal" life. I could have watched this for about 5 hours, but the film is just under 2 hours...
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Post by htmb on Oct 4, 2016 0:07:45 GMT
La Vie Moderne
Very touching documentary about farmers in the Cévennes region of southern France.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 11, 2016 17:53:07 GMT
Today I went to see a documentary which was both uplifting and gut wrenching, Les Pépites (Little Gems). It tells about a rather odd French family that fell in love with the movie The Sound of Music and decided to live the life of the Trapp family. They toured France and then Europe dressed up in Tyrolian costumes and put on their show all over the place. This did not make them rich. In fact they sold everything they had and lived with their four or five children in a camper van.
Somehow they ended up in Cambodia and saw the hundreds of children living on the garbage heaps of Phnom Penh. They were already in the habit of making films of what they did, so one of the strong points of the film is showing the children when they first met them and then showing them again ten years later -- and also showing that the garbage dump has been abandoned. Some of the kids, with blank faces but with tears welling in their eyes explain how they were beaten by their parents if they did not bring enough back every day, and their parents did not care if they branched out into child prostitution. But some of the descriptions of daily life were even worse. Some of the trucks with the most valuable things came from the hospitals. The kids would grab up all of the hypodermic needles "but sometimes there were babies in the trash. We thought they were dead, but some of them would move and cry for about ten minutes."
When the couple decided that they absolutely had to do something, they asked the children what they wanted the most. "To go to school and to have one meal a day." Not two or three, just one. And so that's how their charity began, paid for by small donations from around Europe...
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Post by htmb on Oct 14, 2016 18:53:17 GMT
I'd like to see this documentary.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 14, 2016 21:24:19 GMT
Oh, yes indeed!
Even though we know about all those strictures, seeing them laid out as they are in that trailer is still shocking.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2016 22:31:46 GMT
That is one subject about which I have personally absorbed too much first hand information over the years, but it is excellent for other people to discover more details.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2016 15:21:36 GMT
Today I went to see Fuocoammare, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It has no narration, just images of life and death in Lampedusa. There are images of the local residents trying to go on with their lives as best as possible and images of the Italian coast guard and navy trying to evacuate refugees from small boats and then going back to offload the corpses. It really made me sick to think about the repulsion and rejection of the rich world that refuses to accept these people.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 18, 2016 15:41:03 GMT
It's impossible to watch even the trailer without crying, so I imagine you were pretty much devastated when you came out of the movie theater. Yes, as you say "the repulsion and rejection of the rich world" is sickening, a stance shared with Lampedusa's mayor.
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Post by htmb on Oct 23, 2016 20:07:44 GMT
I've only watched a few minutes of this, but believe it is the full "Ladies First" documentary about women voting and running for office in Saudi Arabia.
A link is also posted on the New York Times home page.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 23, 2016 22:30:57 GMT
Great -- thanks for that!
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Post by Kimby on Nov 28, 2016 1:33:10 GMT
Quote Post Options I watched LIFE, ANIMATED on the plane trip to Florida. A sweet documentary film about a non-speaking autistic boy who watches Disney videos over and over until he begins communicating in Disney dialog. His parents (his Dad is journalist Ron Suskind) learn to communicate with him and guide him to young adulthood and semi-independence. He falls in like, learns from his older brother how to French kiss, and gets his heart broken. And he gets invited to speak at an autism conference in Australia.
A very nice little film.
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