Death, Horse, Death, the Devil, and a CRAZY person

A Family Undertaking is a movie about home burials and taking care of our dead loved ones at home.  This movie is incredible.  I think that one man whose wife had just died and they were taking care of her at home summed it up the best, that having her in the home after she died was more helpful for the family to see that she was truly gone.  Another woman who lost her seven year old daughter in a car accident was talking about how her two sons were in the car when the accident happened, and after she felt that if her daughter’s body would have been taken to a funeral home, the boys would never have gotten the opportunity to understand and see that their sister had died.  Great movie, I highly recommend.  It’s making me want to go take the $465 course to become a home death practitioner. 

HeroinTown is a movie about a news story.  60 Minutes came and did a story about this small town and it’s horrible heroin problem.  This movie is in response to the 60 Min story, and yet it is really poorly done. It’s like they gave a camera to someone and said
“here, make a movie” and he did.  Not worth watching, didn’t keep my interest, I was ready for it to be done after 15 minutes, and then it kept going for another hour and seven minutes. It does make me a little melancholy for the Curben. 

Right To Exit is a movie about Dr. Kevorkian’s legal battle and time in prison.  He was a fascinating man, played the flute, spoke five languages, incredibly intelligent.  Good movie, I had just seen all the info before.

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.  Lee Atwater was a Republican campaign manager who worked for many, many candidates, and was the guy who came up with many of the dirty tricks that the Republicans use still.  He seems like the kind of person I have no respect for, he didn’t actually believe in the Republicans ideals, he just did it to make a name for himself.  He is Karl Rove’s mentor.  He used a opponents mental health history and said that he had been “hooked up to jumper cables”.   He was the architect of the “Willie Horton” ads, and changed the face of politics to this day.  Interesting movie, very well done.

Alive! Is Michael Jackson Really Dead?  This is a crazy movie.  I enjoy conspiracies, but this one is silly.  Things like the fact that the autopsy has the name “Michael Joseph Jackson” but his name is really “Michael Joe Jackson”.  Seriously.  This movie is messed up, with no real details but just questions and things like “Elvis lived in Graceland, MJ lived at Neverland”.  Seriously, crazy! She is adding meaning to his dancing, like making it into sign language. HA! Ok, she just used the Weekly World News as a source.  This movie is BS!

Pot, Pimp, Passing on

Square Grouper is a movie about the South Florida pot trade, focusing on three stories of groups of people that were caught smuggling.  It gets to the point where you have seen one of these drug smuggling movies, you have seen them all! Not really all that interesting, but filled some time.

Katt Williams: Nine Lives is a back stage look at Katt Williams, that he didn’t seem to be involved in the making of.  It ha some good interviews with people, but it seems to be light on facts, it’s kinda like a behind the music without the musicians. J  I think Katt Williams is one of the best comedians to come out of the US in the past 20 years, and this movie really didn’t give me any more information than I had before I watched it.  It did make me laugh though.

Frontline: Facing Death is a very well done look at people facing end of life decisions, and the difficulty that surrounds making those choices.  Frontline always does a good job of presenting an even story on hard issues.  This is a well done film, and the families that they profiled were very strong when facing hard choices.  I know that it would be difficult for people to say yes, it’s time to take them off the machine, but people should really think about that more.  When your mother is old, has Alzheimer’s and is on a ventilator, she doesn’t want you to give her a tracheotomy.  Trust me. 

God, Iraq, Coffee and Jail

You know how sometimes, you have no motivation to do anything, even something as simple as finding and watching documentaries? Ok, well that is my life this last week.  I watched a lot of The Event, and the Daily Show, and Law and Order. 

A few docs made it; Selling God which is a funny and smart look at how churches use marketing tactics to get more people into the pews.  It is clearly biased against evangelicals, so you know I enjoyed it. :D

Iraqi’s Hired Guns is a NatGeo doc about Iraq.  Nat Geo loves Iraq! It’s your typical Iraq movie, talking about contractors working in Iraq.  It is a little odd to me how this show explains in decent detail how to make an IED called an EFP Explosive Formed Penetrator.  Thanks NatGeo!   

Hot Coffee is a great movie about the civil judicial process and how the media uses half-truths to convince people that capping civil judgments and having strict Tort Reform is the way to go, when it really harms people.  This movie made me a little sick, because for example, the woman who spilled McDonald’s coffee on herself, that was the butt of many jokes about frivolous lawsuits…that woman had third degree burns all over her inner thighs from the coffee.  She had to have skin grafts, and only sued after McDonalds refused to pay for her medical expenses.  Great movie. (this is available on HBO but not Netflix, so sue me).

Next up is After Innocence about people who were convicted of crimes and then exonerated after DNA evidence was tested.  Some of these guys were exonerated, but their records weren’t expunged and so they still have to say they were convicted of a crime, even though they were released because there was evidence they didn’t commit the crime.  That’s messed up. Holy crap, the guys who are released are given no services like parolees get.  Just the money in their accounts and their property.  Messed. Up. You know, I just keep watching movies about how embarrassed Americans should be.  Seriously.

Polka, Jesus, Videogames and Whine

Up first today is The Man Who Would be Polka King.  It’s about a man named Jan Lewan who was a polka star in PA, and who ran a ponzi scheme.  Old people lost a ton of money, but I mean, I’m sorry to say this, but who invests money in a polka band and gift shop? I mean…common sense people. Jan is a pretty amazing individual, just so full of himself and how important he could be.  Now he sits in state jail. Oh…something bad is about to happen…yep…four months after he went to jail he got stabbed, but lived.  The victims that he conned all say that the guy didn’t stab him enough since he lived.  WOW, people hate him. 

The next movie up is For the Bible Tells Me So, about the view of homosexuality by the Christian Church.  So far, the best quote was from Jimmy Swaggart, he of the prostitute hiring and lying, “I have never seen a man I would want to marry, and if one of them looks at me like that I will kill him and tell God he died.” This movie is really good.  They seem to be fairly balanced…although they are somewhat pro-gay I will admit. They point out that many Biblical literalists collect interest on investments, which is against God.  Oh, this is going to be fun for me, thank you movie for yet another awesome comeback! There is a woman who rejected her lesbian daughter because of the advice of her church, and because of her learning from Focus on the Family.  The daughter then killed herself, and the woman realized how much she had missed by rejecting her daughter. 

Now playing is Playing Columbine, which says that it is a discussion about a video game called “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!”. It was a Role Player Game where you are the shooters in Columbine.  The movie touches on this topic, but really focuses more on how society blames video games and television etc, for the violence and school shooting.  It is an interesting movie, a little heavy handed with the message, but since I agree with it I like the movie.

Last movie for today is Odds of Recovery about some lady who had a bunch of surgeries.  Ok, so I am not a fan.  I don’t like movies with no spoken narration but rely on short sentences to move the story.  I also am not a fan of the camera work in this movie, because it rarely is focused on a person, but is mostly on other things.  I am really not a fan, it seems like she is just focused on whining about her doctors.

crazy, death, iraq

First up today is Frontline: The Released about how mentally ill inmates get better treatment in jail/prison than they do when they are released, which causes a cycle of criminal behavior.  In the 70’s the government closed a lot of mental instructions, for preference of “home care”.  The problem is that the home care never materializes, so prisons have become the new mental instructions.  So many people have no help with their mental health problems and we are making them criminals instead of getting them treatment.  This movie makes me miss the place I lived when I was 18, the Curben.  I was surrounded by people with serious mental illness most days, and I miss that sometimes.  Sometimes I think that I should go try to work with the homeless mentally ill, because it is always interesting.

Moving on in a frontline sort of day to Frontline: Post Mortem about death investigations in the US and the lack of standardization.  Pretty decent movie, here it is in a nutshell.  Some coroners don’t know what they are doing, there is a lot of corruption, there is no standardization, and no real qualifications.  Interesting movie, but not a lot to say about it.

(in here I had a three hour Intervention break)

Three Soldiers is the story of three soldiers who committed suicide in Iraq.  Operation Iraqi Freedom has had the highest levels of suicide in Army history. The families say they can’t believe that their loved one committed suicide, and the army says that the people who had the most severe mental health issues would be unlikely or unable to seek treatment.  While this movie is about a serious topic, it is not a well made movie.  The stories switch back and forth with no segues and it gets a bit confusing after a while.  Also they say it is about three soldiers, but really it is about two, with two others mentioned briefly.

Food, Flights and Colonists

It’s been a few days, but I have had to lay of the docs for a few.  The subject matter of most docs, or at least the ones I find interesting, is sadness.  I have been a little too sad in my own head, so I have been watching bad tv instead. :D 

Yesterday though, I did watch a couple.  The first was called I Like Killing Flies about a man who runs a tiny restaurant in NYC.  He has like, over 500 menu items, and the movie just discussed his deciding after 25 some years to move to a different location.  It was interesting, and the people were freaks.  He would throw people out of the restaurant if they were a party of more than four.  It was funny.

Second, I watched Super Carrier which was discussing the USS Eisenhower after it had been retrofitted, and was getting certified for combat.  It talked a lot about how carriers work, and how they fling the jets off and catch them when they come back.  There is also some accident footage, which was creepy.  One guy got sucked into an engine, and lived! Wow!

The last one was Jamestown, which was discussing how the Jamestown colony was founded, and what happened to the settlers, and who their mysterious leader was.  It was…um…very scientific.  Zzzzzzzzzzz Makes me sad when I realize how little I care about history. 

Hippies, haters, debt

Commune is the first movie of the day.  Ha, I love it when semi famous people show up in movies as a participant. Peter Coyote is in this, because he lived on the commune for a while. I think that what this movie does a good job of showing is that sometimes, what is good for an individual is not good for anyone who is dependant on that individual.  This was a very well done movie, showing both the good and bad of communal life as realized by Black Bear Ranch.

I decided what is better after a movie about peace loving hippies than to go directly to Blood in the Face, which is about White Power idiots.  So far, I have heard an old fat white guy say with pride “We are more Nazi than the Nazis”.  A German immigrant saying “We should send the foreigners back to Africa where they belong”.  Um….it’s sad when you are so stupid you don’t even know what you are saying.  It is amazing to me as I watch this movie how few white racists are educated and well to do.  It is so easy for people to blame their issues on others, and these KKK/WAR/ANP people are just blind.  Blaming everyone but themselves for their place in society. Ok, during the KKK wedding, the reverend said “Bless them in Jesus name, the youngest son of God the Father”.  God had other sons? I need more information! “Why can people want to save the whales, but not the white race?” Because no one is persecuting and killing white people en masse.  “You don’t see dogs going outside of their species, why would people?”  Well see sweetie, dogs are the species, and they mix breeds all the time.  In humans, that is our species and our races are breeds so to speak so your argument is retarded. Oh, hey, that’s Micheal Moore doing one of the interviews, this must have been damn near his first movie. 

Moving on to the next movie, it is called I Want Your Money and it’s a tea-party movie.  Socialism is bad, because if you give people the same things, everything will stop working.  Oh my hell, it’s like a giant love story to Ronald Regan.  For real people, he wasn’t THAT great of a president. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours.”  So, what if you are the neighbor? So, the movie while a big ole love affair with Regan and hatin’ Obama, it is saying that W did a bad job…so I guess I can agree with that. :D  Ok, this movie is clearly a bunch of white rich guys, with the occasional rich black guy thrown in, complaining about being taxed.  I hate taxes too, but I think that when you start saying that American corporations are here to help the people, I call Bullshit!

Frontline: the Card Game, which is about credit in the United States.  I have to say that the former CEO of Providian is pretty ballsy to say “Yep, we just wanted to add fees so that we would make more money”.  I mean, at least he is telling the truth. I have such a brain crush on Elizabeth Warren. People throw around the “this will destroy America” phrase so often it has lost meaning.  Restricting credit card fees is not going to destroy America, it is just gonna piss off the banks.