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Some Great Documentaries On Instant Watch

This last week or two, I’ve watched some really great documentaries on Netflix instant watch. They’re all about people and creativity and life-living to varying degrees. These are some of my favorite topics. I like them all, and recommend each movie. They’re all about more than they seem to be about, which is the best thing about good documentaries. Here’s a list of them in the order starting with what I consider the best one:

1. Marwencol - A brain-damaged man tries to make sense of the world by building a highly detailed 1/6 scale model town where each doll represents someone he knows in real life. His still photography of different scenes and stories he’s made up in the town are really amazing. To me, this movie is about play in its most important and serious form, as an art.
2. I Like Killing Flies - A foul-mouthed New York cook and restauranteur has to move his business after 30 years in the same location. Despite how low-quality the filming is (you can very often see the filmmaker holding a lapel mic up into the frame to get better audio) I think it was really well-shot under the circumstances, and found myself admiring how some of the shots were taken in the tiny kitchen.
3. The Parking Lot Movie - There’s a parking lot where PhDs and philosophers and artists go to work and figure out what to do next. They don’t really belong in the parking lot, but it’s a good place for them to sit and think and figure things out about the world. That’s the official story of the documentary, but I can’t quite see things working out like that in the real world. This movie, more than any other on the list, is about my life. It shook some shit loose in my soul.
4. Beyond the Mat - This movie was made by someone who is not normally a documentary maker. Lots of the great documentary style is therefore missing, and there is some pretty intolerable narration. Aside from that, this is a great look at how the world of professional wrestling works, and how some of its stars can’t cope with the fame. There are some particularly powerful moments with Jake “The Snake” Roberts, as well as with Mick Foley aka Mankind.
5. Off the Charts - I had no idea this industry existed. Apparently in the backs of shitty magazines there are ads from Nashville that say they really need people to write and submit song lyrics or song poems. They get these people to send them in, and then write a letter back saying “That’s awesome. We’d love to record it, and we just need 80 bucks from you to get it rolling.” Then the people send in their money and a couple guys (or one guy in some cases) make the song up from scratch in like 30 minutes, record it, mix it, master it, and then send a CD or tape or record to the person who wrote the song poem, enticing them to send more in. What a weird way to make money. The song poem writers are some of the most strange people I’ve ever seen in a documentary.
6. Fall From Grace - Fred Phelps is the exact opposite of what he thinks he is. His son is the most frightening person in this film.
7. Vernon, Florida - If Errol Morris is to be believed, everybody in this town is exactly as strange as this old man is. This movie is a series of interviews with the residents of Vernon, Florida in 1980. I like the Errol Morris documentaries because he has a certain way of helping people’s weirdness come out. I don’t know if it’s his interviewing style, or simply patience of sitting politely through odd stories and boring things, but he finds this gold. What I like about it isn’t that I get to laugh at people and think they’re dumb, but the genuineness and sincerity with which everybody in the film takes their place in front of the camera. The Errol Morris documentaries about weird people seem really optimistic to me. Plus, I like weird people.

I watched a few others during the same time, like A Film Unfinished (historical documentary about the filming of a Nazi propaganda film in the ghetto of Warsaw) and Thumbs Up (a hitchhiking documentary series about the street artist David Choe and his cousin having shenanigans around the country (and in the third season, in China). They were both good in their own way, and interesting to me, but they don’t fit the list above in the same way that all of those 7 movies hang together for me. That’s a lot of watching for me, and I added a bunch more similar documentaries.