The MoFo Top 100 Documentaries Countdown

100. Anne Frank Remembered
99. Touching the Void
98. Earthlings
97. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On
96. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
95. Dogtown and Z-Boys
94. March of the Penguins
93. Listen to Me Marlon
92. Isle of Flowers
91. The Missing Picture
90. Jackass: The Movie
89. Spellbound
88. Histoire(s) du cinema
87. Haxan
86. Sicko
85. The Times of Harvey Milk
84. J2ckass
83. Salt of the Earth
82. The House Is Black
80. The Seven Five
80. Salesman
79. Dark Days
78. Brother's Keeper
77. Koyaanisqatsi
76. Harlan County U.S.A.
75. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
74. Burden of Dreams
73. Catfish
72. That's Entertainment!
71. Indie Game: The Movie
70. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
69. Nanook of the North
68. West of Memphis
67. Woodstock
66. For All Mankind
65. Roger & Me
64. The Fog of War
63. Hearts and Minds
62. Religulous
61. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
60. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
59. Close-Up
58. Capturing the Friedmans
57. Deliver Us from Evil
56. Last Train Home
55. My Best Fiend
54. Beauty Day
53. Pumping Iron
52. The Cove
51. Titicut Follies

Seen 3/ 51.

I think I have seen 4 myself.

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Fear and Loathing in MoFo... The Gunslinger 45's Top 50 Favorite Films

In the 10 Ring: Gunslinger45's reviews

Nevermind, I am up to six now. I voted for The Last Waltz and Going Clear. Going Clear was actually one of my top 10 of 2015. Great documentary.

4. Restrepo
7. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
8. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
15. The Last Waltz

I'm starting to think I should have taken more time to make my list, even though I'm really happy with all the films on it. I didn't have either of these excellent films on my list, but they reminded me of some others I should have considered. Going Clear is eye-opening and maddening, yet somehow overkill too (for me). My write-up for The Last Waltz is little more than a listing of artists and their songs, but here it is anyway.
My List:
8. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
10. My Best Fiend
22. Dogtown and Z-Boys
25. 5 Broken Cameras (1-pointer)
Seen 54/54

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

That's 50.

98. Earthlings
90. Jackass: The Movie
85. The Times of Harvey Milk
69. Nanook of the North
62. Religulous
52. The Cove


I've seen these.

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Y'know, even though I'm making the art for these, I've only seen 3 of them so far.


Jackass
Jackass 2
Pumping Iron


Glad I decided on doing the art rather than entering a list

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The Last Waltz was my #13.

Sometimes you don't need words.



If he hadn't made it as the world's foremost purveyor of Celtic Soul, (Now Sir) Van would have been a shoe-in for the Folie Bergere.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I don't think I've seen The Last Waltz. If I did, I turned it off quickly enough to've forgotten.

Going Clear is alright, but I feel the same way about it as I do Restrepo.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Both of those were very good but neither made my list. I wonder how much of a part the HOF played in Triumph of the Wills placing.

Saw both, voted for neither. I am glad I watched Triumph Of The Will but I wasn't voting for it. It's a piece of history but it's still Nazi propoganda.

The end of Gimme Shelter was great but I was pretty bored up to that point.

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Letterboxd

I didn't vote for these either, but I've seen each numerous times, so I find them fascinating, if not entertaining in the traditional sense. Gimme Shelter shows how out of control a rock concert and the Hell's Angels can get. Having the Stones watch the movie in the editing room and commenting on the craziness adds a level which others of these type films don't have. I couldn't really make out the murder the first time I saw this, but the film is now cleaned up enough to see everything.

Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) -

I've had this discussion at other forums, and I always come down on the side that Leni Riefenstahl's films should be studied. It's not really that different from other films. Even though she was making a "documentary" film with what may be perceived as a skewed perspective, and thus it's a propaganda film, every film made is from a perspective and could be perceived as a "propaganda" film. It's only what we know about the Nazis after the fact that turns Leni Riefenstahl into a horrible monster, someone who a few believe is as bad as Hitler himself!

Leni Riefenstahl is an incredibly important and interesting personage in the history of world cinema, and I too find it disturbing that people want to censor her work. This is not because I'm a neo-Nazi; far from it. It's because "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Riefenstahl was a cinematic genius. I posted that incredible film above, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl because it's a superb three-hour documentary which goes over her entire life, and it mixes many scenes from her movies with an interviewer grilling her in her old age about questions which she mostly answers, but seems a bit uncomfortable in doing so. I'm not here to talk about whether she was a Nazi or not. (She never joined the party.) But, she did stay in Germany when most of the greatest filmmakers and actors took off, so why did she do it? She may have done it just to show that she was a great filmmaker and maybe she was truly naive or didn't actually pay attention to politics. She kept saying, over and over about Triumph of the Will, that the film won awards throughout Europe. She was proud of her skills and proud of the accolades from critics and viewers. I'm not here to rationalize her behavior, but I am here to attest to the fact that she knew how to shoot and edit a film for maximum emotional and aesthetic impact, even when her aesthetics actually do lean towards a form of racism and sexism.



The opening of Triumph of the Will shows a subliminal storytelling skill which few films have ever matched. It begins in the clouds, amongst the Gods, and eventually we see an airplane bringing God (Hitler) down from Heaven to Earth to be with his "children" and nurture them. When "He" arrives, the people all passionately welcome him in a monumental parade. After that, the entire country (especially the youth) seem mobilized to make their country grow in strength and do hard labor to improve the land for "all of us". It's only later at the Nuremberg Rallies where the question of "outsiders and undesirables" is mentioned that the implication that Germany will flourish better if it was "purer" is raised. Riefenstahl claims she had no hand in the staging of all the massive scenes in the film, but sometimes that seems hard to believe because the camera is always in the right place, whether it be for composition, context or maximum impact. Boy, I hope I don't sound like a Nazi here, but this film is a textbook of cinematic vocabulary, even if I find her followup, Olympia, the document of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, to be far more groundbreaking cinematically. To give Riefenstahl some credit, in Olympia there is at least three times more footage of the African-American star of the Games, Jesse Owens, than there is of Der Fuhrer.



OK, even though there's more to say, I'll cool it and come back later. I hope somebody else responds before I return. Oh, and since I know what Roger Ebert thinks about Song of the South, I'm betting he tries to slam the movie bigtime. Believe me, the movie has things to slam, but it still should never be censored, no matter what Rog may think.

Gimme Shelter was my #1! The Stones are my favorite band and I love every second of it.

I liked Triumph of the Will but did not vote for it.

1. Gimme Shelter #45
2. Hearts and Minds #64
13. West of Memphis #69
14. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness #62
15. Beauty Day #54
19. Last Train Home #56
25. Pumping Iron #53

Seen 17

It seems that other movies that have showed up from that Hall of Fame benefited greatly. I'm not so sure about this one. I didn't vote for it and it was my nomination. I don't remember many of the other Hall of Fame members loving it either.

I did not like Triumph of the Will and did not vote for it.

Two more from my list have been revealed, in fact two from my top ten. It'll be no surprise to most of you that I had Scorsese's The Last Waltz on my list, nor that it was high (had it at number ten). It is still the best concert doc, bar none, for me. And I had Frederick Wiseman's The Titicut Follies as my seventh overall pick.

Titicut was Wiseman's first documentary, and remains one of his best after all of these years (he is still making films, folks, at age eighty-six and counting, with this past year's Jackson Heights his latest). Since Titicut may be Wiseman's most famous title, I fear this may be his only appearance on this list. Which, frankly, is sad. He is one of the best, most influential, and most prolific documentarians the form has yet known. He could and probably should easily have five or ten or fifteen on a top hundred documentaries list.

So if you've never seen his work, or maybe seen one or two randomly over the years, I encourage you to dive in. You won't be sorry.

That makes ten on mine, so far...

1. The Times of Harvey Milk (#85)
5. Burden of Dreams (#74)
7. Titicut Follies (#51)
10. The Last Waltz (#47)
11. Roger & Me (#65)
13. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (#70)
16. Harlan County, USA (#76)
18. Brother’s Keeper (#78)
22. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (#60)
24. Close-Up (#59)

Of my remaining fifteen, twelve are almost certain locks, and may make up most of the top twenty on this countdown. As for the other three, one is from the last five years and I feel like if it was going to show it probably would have done so, by now. Another is very famous, but little seen, so I honestly don't know if it'll make it? And the last one, historically very important and people would have had access to it, but again it seems like if it were going to show it would have happened by now.


*my band is currently learning this song. I am sooooo psyched!

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

From a 2008 review....

So I wrote in 1994, in a review of what in fact is a better documentary, Ray Muller's "The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." I was referring to Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" (1935), about the 1934 Nazi Party congress and rally in Nuremberg. Others would have agreed with me. We would all have been reflecting the received opinion that the film is great but evil, and that reviewing it raises the question of whether great art can be in service of evil. I referred to "Triumph" again in the struggle I had in reviewing the racist "Birth of a Nation."

But how fresh was my memory of "Triumph of the Will"? I believe I saw it as an undergraduate in college, and my memory would have been old and fuzzy even in 1994, overlaid by many assertions of the film's "greatness." Now I have just seen it again and am stunned that I praised it. It is one of the most historically important documentaries ever made, yes, but one of the best? It is a terrible film, paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong and not even "manipulative," because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer. It is not a "great movie" in the sense that the other films in this group are great, but it is "great" in the reputation it has and the shadow it casts....

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

So far from my list;-
Touching The Void
Haxan
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Close Up
Pumping Iron
Going Clear
Gimme Shelter
My Best Friend

Only watched 9/56 so far.

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Too weird to live, and too rare to die.