Airlines get a lot of grief for nickel-and-diming customers while simultaneously reducing services, but one thing I have to give them credit for is offering a pretty decent selection of free movies on the longer flights. While flying home from Europe last weekend, I was happily able to kill three hours of the nine-hour flight [Read More]

In a post from awhile back, we shared some of our favorite documentary films, and Hoop Dreams was identified as “must-see.” It definitely lands in my all-time favorite top ten. The Interrupters is another documentary by the same filmmaker, Steve James, who co-directed and produced the film with Alex Kotlowitz.  The personal story-lines in The [Read More]

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead seems like a combination of things. It begins as the personal journey of Joe Cross, the filmmaker, to a healthier life. He also mixes in some education on nutrition. And the films ends with an inspirational moment and an invitation to change our bad eating habits. Stories of personal journeys [Read More]

Mugabe and the White African raises all kinds of questions. If you are white, can you be African? Do white African farmers today owe black Africans anything because of the transgressions of European colonists from 100 years ago? If so, should there be a forced transfer of land ownership from whites to blacks if the [Read More]

I’m sure it’s the same in countries across the world, but I’m sometimes struck by what a diversity of cultures exists here in the U.S.  The immigrant populations certainly contribute to that, but I’m thinking of the differences from one geographic region to the next. While watching two documentaries recently, Buck and Rank, I kept thinking: ”Wow, [Read More]

A documentary about a grown man playing with dolls in his back yard wouldn’t seem, initially, like a very engaging film.  What makes it work, however, is the absolutely honesty and vulnerability of the film’s subject, Mark Hogancamp. Mark was viciously attacked and beaten outside a bar in Kingston, NY in April 2000, and was [Read More]

Romántico is sad, funny, visually beautiful, heart-wrenching, soulful, moving, and poignant.  And I almost didn’t watch it.  The Netflix description is so inaccurate – “two Mariachi singers play for unappreciative audiences in San Francisco” – that I came very close to skipping over it. A truer description of the story line might say something about [Read More]

The Great Happiness Space is a documentary that is full of sad people.  It focuses on a Japanese host club, Cafe Rakkyo in Osaka, in which young, stressed-out and lonely women pay “host boys” to entertain them and escape from life. At first, this seems just a little pathetic and nothing more – why not [Read More]

Some parents do know how to damage their kids, and Monika Hertwig and Sebastian Marroquin are sad examples.  Both were children of fathers who were not ideal role models, to put it lightly.  Monika’s father, Amon Goeth, was the sadistic commander of a German death camp during World War II.  Sebastian’s father was Pablo Escobar, [Read More]