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I’m a bit torn on this documentary.

On the one hand, it’s a great primer on how the national debt works and how easily distracted we are by petty arguments over 1% of the budget (the so-called pork-barrel spending projects). It also explains the various forms of deficits (not just monetary!) and how we’re able to gather the money to run deficits. Clinton’s administration even gets credit for sound fiscal policy – amazing, but true!

So, yay, for learning things we hear about everyday but probably don’t wholly understand.

Boo for a few other things. Dismissing the 10% of the budget as “inconsequential” that is wrapped up in tax cuts for the wealthy and the Iraq war. And then there’s the not-so-subtle “if you go after National Health Care, you’ll ruin the country!” message. This is the most frustrating part of the documentary. For a documentary so fixated on simplifying the message of national debt, it amazes me that not a single person thought to even mention for Medicare/Medicaid and pharmaceutical budge pieces that will balloon that the answer should possibly be looking into why medical inflation runs four to five times that of the general inflation rate. Not once did the documentary suggest questioning why the US pays more for the same prescription medicine than any other country in the world. (Or why we still allow advertising for Rx’s – a cost that is passed along to consumers.)

The filmmakers only wanted to show that we’d have to pay over half of our pay to taxes to keep up with our needs. That was frustrating.

Here’s something I’ve learned – when it comes to the zombiepocolypse, I need someone who can be strong when it comes to crying animals. I know that we’ll need to do things to get our meat stuffs (and I do love the meat stuffs). I’m fine with the carcass and the raising and all that, but I can’t take the crying animals. It breaks my heart. So if you were looking for a way into the compound, now you know what to pad your resume with!

That being said, this was HEARTBREAKING. And wonderful. It followed a family of camel herders in Mongolia. Not only was this peak into nomadic life fascinating, but we had the pleasure of being there during birthing season. And this is where the sadness started. They had a white camel whose mother wouldn’t take it. They tried everything – and you’d hear this poor baby just bleating for its mother all day while Mom just ignored it. My heart broke for this family.

The film deals with a rather unconventional way to bring the mother and calf back together. At the same time, it involves a trip into the city which brings some question about sustaining the lifestyle for the family as it’s obvious the smaller children are more enthralled by modern convenience than life in the desert.

It really is a sweet film. I promise.

Michael Apted started this documentary series back in 1964 – with seven year olds. Every 7 years, he’s checked back in with these children as they’ve become adults – the final one filmed when they were 49. So we watched:

7 Up
7 plus 7 Up
21 Up
28 Up
35 Up
42 Up
49 Up

Yes, it’s a lot, but this was incredibly compelling stuff. And just to prove the watershed moment in culture that this British documentary series has had, the Simpsons even parodied it rather famously in season 18 in a episode called Springfield Up.

Apted’s agenda was clear from the beginning – he was taking aim at the have and the have-nots of the British educational system. The 14 children profiled included a cross-section of working class families, boys from group homes, children from the middle class and children of privilege. The amazing thing was that the beginning of this project could not have possibly predicted how much of that world of 1964 would no longer exist by 2006, but how much of the class society would be firmly in place.

At the same time, seeing these children at seven grow into very real adults also showed how life could be very different for close friends. Well, privilege still begets privilege – I can share that “spoiler” for everyone.

At the same time, the working class and middle class lines were harder to hold. Those children weren’t as bound to those lines as they grew up, nor did they seem as equipped to get out or stay in the lines as they made it into adulthood.

Of course, it wasn’t all about money – it was about raising families, marriages, divorces, careers, and watching people decide when they were truly grown up. Some episodes were a joy, others made you simply want to cry as parents died, friendships began to fall away and as one child in particular struggled with mental illness throughout his adult life.

It was an amazing thing to watch. As they grew older, most of the participants began to dread certain parts of the project – after all, the documentaries involved lots and lots of flashbacks. As one of them said, “it’s like having to swallow this little poison pill every seven years.” Then again, they also confessed to having a scrapbook that no one else in the world would ever have a chance to duplicate.

Crazy doesn’t even begin to describe this…

I saw this on the list of money-makers and I thought the people on the front looked oddly familiar, but in that “not really” kind of way. And when I was flipping through the Netflix instant-watch queue, it hit me…

These people were on Judge Karen the other month. (Hey, some of us have stuff on in the background.) I don’t remember what the case was exactly, but they were a lot older and they told their story. A much saner version of the story – that was still insane.

Picture this – girl dates guy who is crazy rich back in the day. He has a private plane and everything. Does some work as an attorney that is somehow attached to the film business. Girl dates him and considers marrying him save the fact that he is already married (a fact she did not know upfront). After years of back and forth dating, she gets her act together and moves on…

And this is where the bad thing happens. In a fit of “if I can’t have you, no one will!” our guy hires someone to kill his best gal. The would-be assassin decides to throw lye in her face and blinds her. Our guy goes to prison for 15 years. She and her then fiance break up, but she manages a life for the next 15 years. Just not a ton of dating since she’s half blind and completely mistrusting of men.

Meanwhile, guy in prison is rather insane. Clinical. Shock treatments and the whole bit. But he’s doing his time. And SENDING HER LETTERS. At some point, he starts sending her money. He’s paroled because he seems to be showing regret and making amends. She’s gotten increasingly lonely. And her girlfriends are worried she’s going to be an old maid.

They. Get. Married.

They. Are. Still. Married.

And it is still crazier than I’m able to convey.

Really, this is just something you watch and you just find yourself amazed at the whole saga…

Another husband choice – this time about soldiers who are in Iraq during 2003-2004. Their home-base is a former palace and they patrol Baghdad during a period where Iraq is supposedly calm and rebuilding.

A few things stand out in the documentary – Sadaam hasn’t been caught, Abu-Graib prison is mentioned when they’re rounding up detainees, and half the soldiers look like they’re 14. Everyone is counting down days until they can get home.

Lots of music and gangster rap fill the days – although you’ll hear the Ride of the Valkyrie played in homage to Apocalypse Now on a nighttime raid. No one said you weren’t allowed to have a sense of humor. They’re quick to point out lack of organization and armor, but it’s clear that these guys bond over their shared misery.

One of husband’s choices – his will generally revolve around military/history channel type things. After seeing this, I get the feeling I can skip Valkrye and be all the better for never having to see the Tom Cruise film.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany and he seemed to be a rather progressive guy back in the day – he studied his seminary in New York and was very into American Black Baptist churches because of the passion of their sermons. He headed back to Germany, excited to impart this passion but found his career path altered when Hitler rose to power.

Part of this film deals with the complicity of the churches when it came to Hitler’s regime. Complicity may be a harsh word – I guess I’m looking for their various survival skills? It gets into the Catholic Churches “treaty” with Hitler where they essentially got their free pass for agreeing not to speak out against Nazi policy.

Bonhoeffer and a few of his contemporaries would have no such complicity. He spoke out against Hitler early on and their seminary was shut down. (They ended up teaching in secrecy.) Eventually, they attempted nonviolent protest. As they became aware of what was happening, the plot to kill Hitler came to fruition.

This was interesting in that it became a spiritual debate – whether it was okay to commit sin in order to prevent additional atrocities. This was, in fact, the failed assassination attempt where Hitler’s heavy desk saved his life. Boneoffer was actually already in prison on a suspected conspiracy charge – but after the assassination, they found out he and others were part of the plot through smuggled letters and torture.

It was a bit dry in places, but it was a story I didn’t wholly know.

Did you know that major cities all over America have these wild parrot populations? There are all sorts of urban legends as to how they get started – mass pet store escapes, escapes from airports, angry roommates setting free annoying birds, and misplaced bird deliveries. Either way, I did learn that parrots can survive cold climates as long as they have food – which has happened in San Francisco.

This isn’t so much the story of the parrots as it is the story of Mark Bittner, a man who is the unofficial caretaker of the birds. He takes in those that are very ill, has names for them, and has studied them. All of this with no real visible means of support – it is as if the universe intended for him to care for these birds. It really is a sweet story and a bit of an underlying tale of what constitutes a native species. (As a bird feeder person, I know the Starling argument, but there’s a point where you have to say, “really, they live here now!”)

It’s really just a sweet story about a neighborhood. There’s a guy at the beginning that sort of represents the, “what do you mean they’re wild – you feed them and name them!” crowd, but it does make sense. According to the documentary, there are wild parrot flocks all over the United Sates, including Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

I really didn’t expect to get sucked in by this, but I did! This follows a small school in Whitwell, TN that, as the principal describes it, “is not depressed, is poor” as you can see she’s clearly tired of softening words. Recognizing that they’re a small, white, Christian town, they decided to institute a diversity program back in 1998. They chose to teach the children about the Holocaust because it demonstrated the worst in people that took hatred too far. At one point when discussing the six million Jews killed, one of the kids wanted a way to visualize six million. They decided to start collecting paper clips (the Norwegians wore paper clips as a sign of solidarity for the Jews in WW II) – and it snowballed from this point. The kids wrote all sorts of people and got donations from all over; and then it got picked up by two freelance reporters and got HUGE.

In this small Tennessee town, they now have a permanent memorial with more than 11 million paperclips (they have millions and millions of spares), an original transport car and kids that give lessons to tours that come through their small town. It really was a great story about the impact a small gesture can have even when you have nothing but an idea to start.

This film from Errol Morris works despite having no reason for working on paper. Let’s see, it’s about an aging lion tamer, a retired topiarist, an expert on naked mole rats and a robot builder at MIT in the 90s. They don’t know each other. They’re all men. They’re all very proud of what they do.

And yet, these stories weave together in an amazing way. In the end, somehow building robots, training lions, being the first expert in building zoo habitats for naked mole rats and being the last of the hand-shearing topairists all flow into each other. Bushes should not be able to be carved into dinosaurs, one should not be able to make robots that walk when they are not specifically programmed to do so, naked mole rats that are workers should not suddenly evolve into queens and one should not be able to tame lions. And yet…well, it’s possible. And for two, it’s the start of their careers – and for two, it’s the twilight.

My only issue is that it appears that this might have started out being mostly about our lion tamer, but was expanded into more – because much of the cutaway material deals with either the circus or the lion tamer’s mentor. At the same time, it was interesting getting to know these folks. And, should I ever come across a naked mole rat, I do know the proper way to hold one now.

This was Awesome.

I cannot describe the epic awesomeness of this film and do it proper justice. On the surface, we have Steve Wiebe, recently laid off and looking for something to do. He spies Billy Mitchell’s long-standing record for high-score on Donkey Kong – nearly twenty years old (or more, it’s fuzzy now). Steve Wiebe buys himself a Donkey Kong arcade game and begins to study as he’s going to beat the game and make a run for the high score.

Sounds boring, right? Hah!

There’s so much more to this story. I had no idea that there was so much drama and intrigue in the world of old arcade games and the world records that one can hold. There are allegations of tampering via a third-party who holds a grudge against those that run a web site (Steve Wiebe is an unwitting victim at this point). There are allegations of favoritism. In this film a clear good vs. evil vibe emerges. Guinness is suddenly a player. Families are at stake – well, they’re just really supportive.

Honestly, I became really invested in Steve Wiebe’s quest to become the greatest Donkey Kong player in the world. We all have our goals, and that was his. I never really got past three or four levels that I could recall, so as a bonus – I got to see screens I never knew existed! (Even the famed Kill Screen!)

This one just had a lot to root for and just shows you that once you have something you’re passionate about, things get complicated. Everyone involved in the games, the website and the tournaments seems to know that their world is small in the grand scheme of things – but that their world in their world is HUGE. For any of us that have had an obsessive hobby that’s become our lives, we know how they feel.