Top 10 Documentaries?

My Favorites

1. The Fog of War (2003)
2. The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)
3. Hearts and Minds (1974)
4. Hearts of Darkness, A Filmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
5. Harlan County USA (1976)
6. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
7. My Voyage to Italy (1999)
8. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
9. Hoop Dreams (1999)
10. Nanook of the North (1922)

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"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."- Groucho Marx

Excellent list. Although I'd probably include at least three of those, I'll try to make a completely different list, in no order.

Night and Fog
Olympia
The Endless Summer
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
The Guns of August
An Inconvenient Truth
Four Days in November
The Black Fox
Riding Giants
Stop Making Sense

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

DOCUMENTARIES

1. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
2. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
3. Brother's Keeper (1992)
4. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998)
5. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
6. Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976)
7. Shoah (1985)
8. Waco: the Rules of Engagement (1997)
9. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
10. Salesman (1968)




FILM-RELATED DOCUMENTARIES

1. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
2. Burden of Dreams (1982)
3. Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1992)
4. Lost in LaMancha (2002)
5. My Best Fiend (1999)
6. The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1995)
7. Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer (1989)
8. A Constant Forge (2000)
9. Tigrero: A Film That was Never Made (1994)
10. George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (1985)




MUSIC-RELATED/CONCERT DOCUMENTARIES

1. The Last Waltz (1978)
2. The Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
3. Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989)
4. Stop Making Sense (1984)
5. Gimme Shelter (1970)
6. The Decilne of Western Civilization (1981)
7. Woodstock (1970)
8. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
9. Speaking in Strings: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (1999)
10. Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)


OK, so I cheated a bit so I could list thirty, and I could easily list another thirty more. I also limited myself to one Errol Morris, one Maysles' Brothers, one Michael Moore, etc.

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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

There was this one that I saw for a class several years back called The Decade of Destruction. Actually it was a multi-part series filmed in the early 80s during a crucial time for the opening of Amazonia in Brazil. As I recall each episode followed a different thread, some of the later ones were focused on the rise of Chico Mendez, those ones were a little less interesting to me but still good. The really amazing stuff was the footage shot on the ground in the middle of a frontier battle between the settlers (mostly urban poor who the government promised supplies, and training and support to go open the rain forest and then left high and dry) and the Indian tribes. They did a pretty good job of getting some local and geopolitical context while also showing a lot of different sides with focus on their various interests. One crew was sent to follow the story of a subsistence farmer whose kids had been kidnapped by Indians (they later found out that one was killed almost immediately and another I think was actually living with the Indians), One crew tracked down an anthropologist or ecologist who had set up camp years before and had in some ways almost "gone native", for me the most interesting thread was following the Indian department of the gov't who were trying to make contact with some of the tribes that had never met the outside world so they could get them vaccinated and try and buffer land conflict between the settlers and Indians. There was some pretty amazing footage there, for example the camera crew being present and rolling in the middle of an Indian raid. That stuff was fascinating and worthy of the best any narrative film-maker has done (including Herzog).

I haven't seen that many due to the majority of bad ones i've seen - but

Dave Chappelle's Block Party was pretty good

Empire of Dreams and King of Kong are both amazing

Supersize me was horrible along with bowling for columbine

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Some of my favorites....


500 Nations (1995)
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story (1992)
In Search Of Ancient Ireland (2002)
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Super Size Me (2004)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)
The Last Waltz (1978)
March of the Penguins (2005)
SWAT: The Real Story (2003)



And I really want to see this one:

Inside Out: Warren Zevon - Keep Me in Your Heart

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H'oh'lee crap. I can't tell if you're making these types of comments to get attention or what, but you should really focus on not being a....

Let me approach this from a different angle.

Would you rather eat fast food in front of the TV or eat dinner you made at a table?

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i got planet earth on blu-ray disc and they got some crazy stuff in there.

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http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/7449/pulpsigof4.jpg

i'm not that great a cook - so fast food

I've only seen bit and pieces of Planet Earth... but what I have seen was awesome....



Maybe you should be watching The Food Network and learning to cook… who knows, you might turn out to be the next Emeril…

Just a few off the top of my head:

Capturing The Friedmans (2003, Andrew Jarecki)

Rocky Road To Dublin (1968, Peter Lennon)

Lost In La Mancha (2002, Keith Fulton & Lewis Pepe)

The White Diamond (2004, Werner Herzog)

Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003, George Hickenlooper)

Don't Look Back (1967, DA Pennebaker)

Burden Of Dreams (1982, Les Blank) (honourable mention to Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe)

God's Angry Man (1980, Werner Herzog)

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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

Is that the one following Warren around while he was recording what turned out to be his final album? If so, it's excellent. I caught it on TV last year.

Yes, that's the one.... It's been on VH1 here several times but I always seem to miss it....

Grey Gardens


American Movie


Decade Under The Influence


Devil's Playground



And I want to see this. It was shot on a camcorder you could buy at a camera shop for a couple thousand dollars: it won awards for best cinematography. Not even HD. That's enough for me to watch it.

Iraq In Fragments

I want to see that one too... and Devil's Playground sounds pretty interesting... thanks....

Is that Devils Playground video the one about the Amish/rumspringer thing? I think my mom (of all people) told me about that one and said I should see it, if that's the same one.

I'm gonna see if I can find Iraq in fragments too, that sounds good.

Yep, Devil's Playground is the doc' about the Amish tradition of rumspinger. It's kind of crazy.

Iraq In Fragments has a pretty interesting website: http://www.iraqinfragments.com/

You could also watch any documentaries made by Albert and David Maysles.

I'd start with Salesman, then Grey Gardens, then Gimme Shelter.

Salesman


Gimme Shelter

It probably didn't run in movie theaters but the best documentary I ever saw was how a small group of oilfield specialists capped the hundreds of sabotaged wells that Iraq left burning in Kuwait when driven out by Desert Storm. As the wells were torched, a lot of scientists and environmentalists started moaning about how it would take years to bring those well fires under control and that meanwhile the smoke and airborne particles were going to alter the monsoon season and trigger drought and crop failures all through India, China, and Indonesia. But in just a coupla months, all the fires were extinguished and the wells capped, primarily by three Houston firms--Red Adair, Boots & Coots, and Wild Well Control--and one Canadian company. The scientists and enviornmentalists predicting doom and gloom back then are the same ones beating the drums about global warming today. Another great documentary was "The Devil's Cigarette Lighter," a huge natural gas well that blew out and caught fire in North Africa some decades ago. The fire was so big that it was visible to orbiting astronauts. It was a complicated and isolated mishap, but Adair (along with Boots and Coots, who then worked for him) extinguished the fire and capped the well.

These are in no particular order:

The Filth and the Fury
King of Kong
Bukowski: Born into this
State of Denial
Stevie
Following Sean
The Atomic Cafe
Another State of Mind
After Innocence
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

If you haven't seen The Atomic Cafe you should. It's about nuclear war propaganda films. It's both hilarious and disturbing. Oh and if you can ever get ahold of any WW1 propaganda films watch them too.

10. Festival Express
9. Gimme Shelter
8. Super Size Me
7. Devil's Playground
6. An Inconvenient Truth
5. Beyond the Mat
4. Sicko
3. Triumph of the Will
2. Bowling for Columbine

1. Pumping Iron

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"What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present." - T.S. Eliot