Is Mr Death the one that starts out about the guy who fixes electric chairs and then turns into a Holocaust denier documentary? I ended up stopping that one. It was interesting at the beginning, but I didn’t sign up the the Holocaust thing. I was hoping to watch a show about death devices. Not just that, but I got so sick of hearing him saying ‘well, there’s no sulfur (or whatever) in these rocks…no holocaust!’
Checking on IMDB, it is the same one I’m thinking of, but it’s not streaming right now. Either way, I really didn’t care for it. Maybe I didn’t read the synopsis well or something, but I felt like I was ‘tricked’ into watching it. I wouldn’t have had a problem watching a movie about what holocaust deniers think and how they go about proving their side, but I didn’t know that’s what this was going to be about. IIRC he got in over his head very quickly. He probably had a habit of biting off more then he could chew. I wonder what he’s up to today.
I thought the point of the program was to demonstrate the rather arbitrary nature of how someone gets to be an “expert” in execution, and somehow by extension an “expert” in death. And I agree that the guy got himself in over his head, which was also kind of the point.
And it certainly wasn’t a “holocaust denier documentary”. It was about a guy who was in over his head with an overblown reputation as an expert in execution techniques, and who ended up being used by holocaust deniers because he didn’t understand the necessary science to interpret the evidence he was looking at.
I liked Mr. Death because of the twist when he gets involved with the Holocaust deniers. I didn’t know about it before I saw it and thought it was just about a guy who is an expert on execution. I thought the twist made his story more interesting.
It’s best if you lived through the Tammy Faye/Jim Bakker era. While they were made to look like complete idiots in the media back in the 80s (and admittedly, for good reason), Tammy Faye shines through very clearly in this as a sympathetic character. It made me love Tammy Faye!
Along with Cropsey and We Were Here, I would also highly recommend Daughter from Danang and Awful Normal. Daughter is a story of a girl from Vietnam who was given away by her mom and sent to America when she was very young. She grows up completely Americanized and then goes back to visit her birth family in Nam. It is very interesting how it all turns out. Awful Normal is about a woman who confrfonts the man who molested her as a child. The man was a friend of the family and vactioned with them etc.
It’s not streaming right now, but it’s a great movie. Of course, it’s about as one sided as a documentary can be and I wouldn’t have minded seeing something come out of the Bakker camp as well, but I think the idea was that every thing the Bakker’s had to say, they said via the media during their 15 minutes. The directors did reach out to Jim during the making but they refused over and over. I’m sure they either didn’t want anything to do with it anymore, didn’t want anything to do with Tammy or just figured anything they said would be twisted around. Honestly, I don’t think we’ll ever know the whole truth about what really went on between Tammy and Jim.
I’ve gotten so many ideas from this thread. Thank you all.
Between the Folds, about the art and science of paper folding, is available to stream on Netflix until 7/15 iirc. There is enough beauty and surprise to interest even non-folders. I picked up this hobby again a few years ago, and wow how paper folding has exploded with the internet and technology! Yet the rules are the same: one piece of paper, no cuts, no glue.
I watched **Girl 27 **the other day. I don’t know if I’d call it a great documentary, but it is a very interesting story. It is about a seventeen year-old dancer who was raped at an MGM sales party in the 1930s. You can probably imagine the immediate aftermath, but the film tries to figure out how the cover-up went down and follows up on the rest of her life.
It takes a bit of a beating in the IMDB reviews, and I wouldn’t argue against those points–Stenn does insert himself into the story. Maybe a different type of filmmaker wouldn’t have gotten in; I don’t know. Either way, the underlying story is worthwhile. It is sad and awful and a bit hard to take, but worth seeing.
Just stay away from the ones that were specifically made for Netflix. They aren’t documentaries, but just a bunch of footage strung together. There’s no narrator to actually document anything.
I agree. Although that part seemed to come out of left field it totally fit the story. It rammed home the point that the guy wasn’t a neo-Nazi or political at all, but that he simply wanted to be liked & accepted by people so badly that he remained oblivious (or ignorant) to the reasons why. Really sad, pathetic little man…
I should probably check it out.