True Films

The Bridge

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:15:09 -0800

This film is about public suicides. They all take place on the world's most popular suicide destination, the Golden Gate Bridge. Every two weeks someone jumps off the Bridge. For 12 months filmmaker Eric Steel and crew kept a cinematic vigil and filmed the jumpers (when his radio calls to police could not rescue them). He then interviewed their surviving family and friends. The stories of the jumpers are sobering and dispiriting. Their departed selves share a common thread of depression, despair, and chronic mental illness. Although it shows sensational footage of their plunges, this is not a sensational film. Indeed it is depressing and immensely sad. There is nothing uplifting, heroic, or romantic about it, even when it succeeds in getting you into the mind-set of the jumpers. Regrettably the film does not explore why this Bridge out of all other bridges, why jumpers usually face the city rather than the ocean, why these suicides are so public and dramatic, and why the controversy around a proposed fence won't go away -- or any of another dozen frequent questions about suicides on this Bridge. Despite its title, this film is not about the Bridge. Rather it focuses solely on the lives and deaths of a handful of desperate people who jumped during the year of filming. It's a troublesome film, but memorable. You definitely need to be in the right state of mind to watch it.

-- KK

The Bridge
Eric Steel
2006, 94 min.
$20, DVD

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Bizarre Foods

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:18:57 -0800

Cooking show meets travel show. The gimmick works. Balding fat chef goes on a quest to eat the weirdest, strangest, most bizarre foods in world. He'll try anything twice, and then give his "review" of it. Humans somewhere will consume anything that moves, or grown, so there is plenty of material. Strict vegetarians may want to avoid watching. Not only is any animal, insect, fish, invertebrate eaten, any part of it is gobbled down is as well.

The host, Andrew Zimmern, is plain spoken and enthusiastic. Sort of the opposite of a food snob. While there's adequate background on each exotic host country and culture, the main emphasis is on Zimmern simply understanding and trying out bizarre foods. I've given my kids the DVDs in order to encourage them to eat outside the box. I think we owe it to ourselves to explore the world's cuisine and outer boundaries of food. You don't have to like it, just try it. Better than several books on the subject, this series will make you rethink your food limits. It's comparative foodology 101. All weird foods have a good story behind them, as revealed in these upbeat documentaries.

There is a competing cooking/travel show hosted by another globetrotting chef, Anthony Bourdain, but this series, No Reservations, is more about the chef himself than the food. I found Bourdain smug, self-centered, prissy, and uninteresting, but your mileage may vary. Some like his snarky style. For a fun journey to somewhere different stick with Bizarre Foods.

-- KK

Bizarre Foods
Andrew Zimmern
2007, 338 min.
DVD, 2 discs, $18

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Living with the Tribes

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:48:35 -0800

This series is the best exposition of a minimal-technological lifestyle that I have ever seen. It is far more revealing than most anthropological documentaries. Here, two white guys go native. For three months they live with a Papua New Guinea tribe that still adheres to traditional hunter gathering mode, using bows, stone and bone tools. Unlike most visitors, including anthropologists, these guys eat only what the tribe eats; indeed, they eat only food that they help find and process. They learn to make their own traditional tools and weapons. Seeing this process we get a very good sense of what is involved in living "in harmony with nature." It's tough. Each week the visitors give up more of their gear until they wear what the tribe wears, which is not much. The filmmakers record their own bumbling attempts to learn how to survive in the forest as these members of the Kombai tribe do, and via their education we get a fantastic view of tribal life.

In the second season, Mark and Olly join the highlander Mek tribe, also in Papua New Guinea (the Kombai were lowland tribe), and again go full immersion. During their four month stay, they build their own hut, get initiated into the tribe, learn to love roots, and get swept up in village and tribal politics.

In the third year, they venture into the Amazon and go native with the Machigenga Tribe. (I have not seen this season because it is not on DVD yet.)

-- KK

Living With the Kombai
Mark Anstice, Olly Steeds
2007, 287 min.
DVD, 2-disc set, $18

Available from Amazon

Rent from Netflix

Living With the Mek
Mark Anstice, Olly Steeds
2008, 319 min.
DVD, 2-disc set, $18

Rent from Netflix

Available from Amazon

Living With the Machigenga
Mark Anstice, Olly Steeds
2009, airing now

Series website (US)

World's Lost Tribes (UK)

Please Vote For Me

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Talk about unleashing democracy in China...here's a cautionary tale. As an experiment a third-grade class in a large city in China introduces elections for the class monitor. Elections are new to the kids, parents and teachers. The results are fascinating, horrifying, and electrifying. Every abuse and virtue of democracy is re-discovered. Bribery, mudslinging, spin, debates, slander, campaign reform -- and all this with the first few weeks in elementary school! We also get a glimpse into how China's one-child policy focuses pathological amounts of parental attention as they "coach" their kids. This short (less than an hour) film operates on many levels: it is a lesson about democracy, a warning to China, a reminder about the lord-of-the-flies savagery of third grade, and a portrait of a fat boy who will probably grow up to someone's tormenting boss -- or president. A lovely hoot, with lots of moments, in Mandarin with subtitles.

-- KK

Please Vote For Me
Weijun Chen
2007, 58 min.
DVD, $23

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Hearts and Minds

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:00:00 -0800

A hard-hitting anti-war expose, aimed at the Vietnam War. By now the sheer folly, criminality, waste, brutality, and stupidity of the Vietnam War is evident, but back in 1974, when this powerful documentary was made, it was a brave step. This film does not pretend to be an even-handed analysis. Like a proto-Michael Moore film, it uses ironic juxtapositions to make its points. It does not counter with Viet Cong atrocities, which have their own foolish brutality, worthy of a similar film. Hearts and Minds ends up being a well-done, entertaining case against war anywhere.

(Just for balance I am eager to see a film making the case that the Vietnam War was a good idea. Nominations wanted.)

-- KK

Most dramatic moment with General Westmoreland

Hearts and Minds
Peter Davis (II)
1974, 112 min.
DVD, $25

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Harlan County, USA

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Filmed in 1975, this award-winning documentary still has bite. It's won much applause for its support of poor hard-scrabble miners in a Kentucky coal community, and their struggles to unionize a job that no human should do. The start of the film gives you an idea of the dirty hell fired up by this kind of low-tech coal mining. But equally important, this film is a deep immersion into the tangled small town Appalachian life of 1975 -- a community and lifestyle that no longer exists. It captures the bloody drama of the strike including the climatic standoff with "scabs" shooting machine guns. Sadly the local villains play out the stereotype of corrupt southern white racists bullies. You could not cast their roles more perfectly. Watching this documentary feels like you spent 2 years sitting on the front porch with these characters, which is what the filmmaker did.

-- KK

Harlan County, USA
Barbara Kopple
1976, 103 min.
DVD, $25

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Meerkat Manor

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:12:15 -0800

This is a reality TV program about meerkats. It is totally engrossing. There is more melodrama packed into one day of this large family of mongoose relatives living in the Kalahari Desert than you'll find on most human shows in a month. Every 24 hours some disaster befalls this clan, and 24-hour cameras record everything. A brave son suffers a lethal snake bite, then stupid teenage baby-sitters go off to play and forget the baby who dies in the heat, a psycho uncle puts the colony in danger, a sad betrayal by a brother-in-law, a rebellious daughter gets pregnant via a male from the enemy clan, a powerful mother plans infanticide, and nasty one-eyed leader from a rival tribe tries to take over -- all that is just the first week!

This long running series has become a huge international hit. There are tons of online forums, discussion boards and YouTube clips interpreting the complicated relationships of these cuddly mammals. The small size of the meerkats speeds up the cycle of their lives, and their open desert home makes filming easy. Plus they stand on two feet -- instant film stars! In addition meerkats are weirdly social animals (the dominant female prevents other females from having families) which makes the saga of their intertwining lives endlessly fascinating.

With 52 episodes now filmed, the series is quite addictive. Unscripted, the shows are constantly surprising. You can never guess what will happen next on this super-charged reality show. Will the wayward daughter live or die? Will her mom kill her children in anger? Will the hated brother break up the clan? Meerkat Manor provides the same gossip-fodder as a human soap opera, except it's far more extreme in its plot turns. It's a soap opera on steroids.

Best of all Meerkat Manor is a supreme piece of natural history -- the cameras and longitudinal study is based the Oxford-sponsored Kalahari Meerkat Project's 10-year observation of these colonies. This series is an intense short course in mammal behavior. Hard not to get hooked.

-- KK

Meerkat Manor: Season 1
Oxford Scientific Films
2006, 280 min.
DVD (3 discs), $16

Official website from the UK makers

Website of the US presenters, including discussion boards

Friends of Kalahari Meerkat Project

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

Rent from Netflix

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Man on Wire

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:00:00 -0800

When he was a boy Philippe Petit saw a sketch of the world's tallest set of twin towers planned to be built in New York City. At that moment he imagined a wire between the two finished buildings and someone -- him! -- walking between them. He had never walked on a wire, and the towers were only an architect's dream, but to Philippe it seemed that the twin towers would be built specifically for this purpose: As a platform for him to wirewalk in the sky.

The rest of Philippe's life was spent in preparing for this inevitability. Learning how to walk a tight rope. Organizing a team. Waiting for the towers to be built. Stealthily casing them before they were completed. Planning the stunt. And then the hair-raising event itself in 1974. With an eye to both history and publicity, a lot of this prep work in the years before were filmed, and that footage is mixed with re-enactments to create an amazing document of an artist unleashed.

This compact, intense, burning grenade of a documentary -- much like Philipe himself -- radiates laser energy and the beauty of something as perfect as a line between two towers in the sky. It is a nearly perfect documentary. It is the only film reviewed by Rotten Tomatoes to rate 100%.

Man on Wire is an astounding, astonishing, head-shaking, exhilarating conquest of the impossible. It made my heart soar.

-- KK

Man on Wire
James Marsh
2008, 94 min.
DVD, $20

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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To Reach The Clouds
Philippe Petit
Paperback $7 / Hardcover $43

Encounters at the End of the World

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0800

What a brilliant film-poem! I like how the marketing puts it: "There is a hidden society at the end of the world. One thousand men and women live together under unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting-edge science."

Superficially this is a film about strange other-worldly creatures and ice formations beneath the the South Pole, and about the eccentric people who live in harsh and unappetizing conditions to study them. But musically scored with a soundtrack of eerie religious chanting, this film feels more like a prayer. It has the same mix of science discovery and spiritual awe you might expect if you were accompanying astronauts on a visit to another planet of life. Which they are. You can feel souls being expanded, and that soul expansion is what is captured here, at the bottom of the world, where unattached philosophers seem to collect as they float over unknown species on this planet. Tempering this exaltation are scenes of the brutal industrialization of a pristine place, annotated by a haunting, depressive narration. The film's title indicates not just the bottom of the world, but also its end in time. It delivers soaring, stunning visions of life made possible by, or in spite of, dirty, mechanical probes into its heart. Somehow this duality of uplift and pessimism works for me. Others may find it too esoteric. I take it as a visual hymn to science.

In fact if there was such a thing as a religion of science, this film would be a good recruitment trailer for it.

-- KK

Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog
2007, 101 min.
DVD, $20

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Here's official trailer:

Michael Palin's New Europe

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:15:00 -0800

My favorite travel host, Michael Palin, explores his own continent. With his usual agreeable wit, Palin departs from his home in Old Europe and with BBC crew in tow, he sets off by train to investigate all 20 newly opened European countries which were formerly off-limit to casual travel. Besides the expected classic Eastern Europe destinations, this journey includes the many new tiny Balkan countries, and several breakaway provinces near Russia, and little visited countries such as Moldavia, Albania, Kalinagrad. To present a country Palin mixes the grand and the tiny, the classic shot and the offbeat, the intelligent uplifting interview and the plain goofy stunt. What else would you expect from a former Monte Python member? This seven-part travelogue on Eastern Europe is fun, revealing, informative, and fresh, and made me eager to know more.

-- KK

Michael Palin's New Europe
2007, 350 min.
DVD, 3 discs, $35

A few clips are available at the official website

The Power of Nightmares

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:03:41 -0800

The thesis of this three-part cinematic essay from the BBC is complex, but plausible. It begins by observing that after the horrors of WWII people no longer rallied around optimistic Pollyanna visions of a better tomorrow. The sole belief that could unite a country then became fear -- fear of communism. A fear that was wildly, if not insanely exaggerated. But when communism collapsed upon itself, a new fear was fanned to keep the electorate united behind leaders. It also is wildly exaggerated. That new fear is "terrorism." It transformed a tactic into an enemy. Furthermore this new uniting nightmare has been produced by two fundamentalist strands in the world: Islamic jihadists and American neo-cons. Both sides are ideologically dogmatic, both exaggerate the threat of the other, and both work on the power of worst-case nightmares, and in a strange way, both need each other to keep their people united. This film is a very polemic, subjective, extended argument. But it is well done, BBC-style, with interviews of the principle characters in the Islamic jihad world and in the US neo-con camp, and some fascinating deep history. It is smart enough to be worth arguing with. The Power of Nightmares has the potential to shift how you frame the "war on terror." At least it shifted my perspective, even if I don't agree with all its conclusions.

-- KK

The Power of Nightmares
Adam Curtis
2004, 180 min.
DVD, $21

Official BBC information

Watch all three parts at the Internet Archive Moving Image Archive

Up the Yangtze

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:58:46 -0800

Everything in China is leaning towards the extremes, including the biggest fastest transformation into modernity. Nowhere is the relentless push toward the extreme felt more than in the mind-boggling, humongous scale of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. To make China's gigantic and impersonal change fathomable and personal, this documentary follows two young adults living in poverty along the Yangtze, and shadows them as they sign up to work on a tourist river boat delivering foreign visitors to the dam. Their story is a remarkable and surprisingly intimate portrait of two ordinary citizens doing what hundreds of millions of their Chinese cohorts are doing -- getting a job. Neither protagonist in this film is even particularly likeable or heroic, which makes their lives all the more real. Their faults and failures are universal. You get a very clear picture of how wrenching, how abrupt, how enticing these vast changes are. You have only to multiply this exceptional intimacy into two people's struggles by a billion to see the country.

So far, this tiny window is the best picture of big change in China that I've seen.

-- KK

Up the Yangtze
Yung Chang
2007, 93 min.
DVD, $27

Official film website

Rent from Netflix

Available from Amazon

The Business of Being Born

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:33:36 -0800

Anyone approaching birth should watch this film about modern midwifery. There was a lot of talk about natural birthing and midwifery 30 years ago, but the buzz about those traditional "alternatives" vanished, while the medicalization of birth has accelerated to extreme heights. Some areas of the country have 45% Ceaserean rates. This film does a great job illuminating how early choices (like inducement) rapidly funnel one's later options into surgery. The complicated figures, jargon, and options are explored by following the film maker as she makes some very hard choices in her own pregnancy. You get to see several natural births play out in cinematic detail; they are stunning. Not what you expect. This documentary is a potential mind-changer.

-- KK

The Business of Being Born
Abby Epstein
2007, 84 min.
DVD, $25

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The Machine That Changed The World

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:00:00 -0800

That would be the computer. This five-part series is a very entertaining history of the computer, what we expected from it, and how it came to be. The series stops before the internet, before the computer's greatest influence, so one might say it's is an incomplete history, but very good nonetheless. Appropriately the documentary is only available online.

-- KK

The Machine That Changed The World
WGBH Television and BBC
1992,
Available at Viddler
Part 1: Great Brains
Part 2: Inventing the Future
Part 3: The Paperback Computer
Part 4: The Thinking Machine
Part 5: The World at Your Fingertips
Also available as a single BitTorrent file from Waxy.org

This American Life

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:21:43 -0800

Here's the legendary radio show of the same name, only in video. Same story telling genius. Same quirky subjects. Same excellence. This American Life is the best thing on radio these days: short, true stories about real people who undergo some kind of transformation. This video version is the same, but different. The journeys are unexpected. Not big deals, but amazing. You'll enjoy them.

-- KK

This American Life
Ira Glass
2008, 120 min.
DVD, $14

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Available from Amazon