Unfortunately, the only thing "biased" about Blackfish is the fact it doesn't paint SeaWorld in a good light and shows the nasty truth. Most people don't like the nasty truth - they want to keep viewing the world through rosy colored sunglasses. Even if you didn't watch the flick do a bit of research into Marine Land & SeaWorld about their whales... the breeding [and specifically the inbreeding] aspect is enough to make one sick. Absolutely no morals whatsoever by either organization in that regard. I mean right now it is either Marine Land or SeaWorld that is illegally trying to breed an extremely young female orca [from a human aspect imagine "breeding" a ten year old girl with a thirty year old man] caught off the Nordic coast a couple years ago and shipped to Spain if I remember correctly. Not only are they training her - which is not exactly legal as they captured her under the scope of nurse to health & release [their own words] - the attempted breeding is indeed breaking the international "nurse to health and release" aspect of wild sea life that she would fall under. Ghosts of Rwandan was okay. The BBC's Pedigree Dogs Exposed was nothing knew to me actually but it was nice to see such dragged to the light Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies I'd like to see a documentary on the growing number of tuskless elephants in Africa. To me it is sort of incredible as the number of tuskless elephants have increased considerably in the last 50 or 70 years. But then on the other hand if such knowledge became common... hunters & poachers would be hunting these animals in droves so that the tuskless gene dies out. I mean not much "value" to a tuskless elephant.
Second @Dunning Kruger on "The Fog of War". Although I watched it back in '05 or '06, so it might not, ah, resonate quite as much today. My personal fave is "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which is marketed as being about Banksy, but is actually much more interesting--it's a documentary about a semi-crazy guy who tries to make a documentary about Banksy, ends up becoming a street artist himself, hi-jinks ensue. It ends up being a pretty great meta-commentary on truth, the portrayal of truth in a film, etc. but is mostly just hilarious and entertaining.
I find the Bruce Parry's series Tribe to be endlessly watchable. His docs are refreshingly free of frills and flannel.
I am seriously missing BBC4. I had to get rid of my TV over in NZ because of the godawful adverts. What I would give to have the BBC back.
BBC4 is quite simply the best channel on Sky. I rarely watch anything else. On topic, coincidently, there's a lady who does a lot of history docs on BBC4. She'd called Lucy Worsely and I am totally infatuated with her. The fact that she can't pronounce her Rs only adds to her appeal.
Yeah, she has this odd (botoxed?) mouth that doesn't move properly. But some of her series were great.
She doesn't strike me as the type to go for botox, and while I know what you mean, it doesn't look like botox to me. Take a look at Nicole Kidman nowadays if you want to know what botox looks like. She looks like she's wearing a mask.
Maybe. It is just one of those things I could not stop starring at. There someone else on BBC4 who had manic hands- they would fly about everywhere as he spoke- and I had to stop watching the series because it was just driving me up the wall.
To be honest, in contrary to what I said about watching little else, many of the presenters on BBC4 irritate the hell out of me. There seems to be a trend for using young, good-looking people who like to express their enthusiasm and demonstrate how big their brains are by talking slowly and over-pronouncing every other word. There's one in particular - a long haired Scot whose accent and manner in which he speaks grates so much I can't watch him. This guy On the flip side, another presenter I can watch endlessly, is George McGavin.
Adam Curtis is an incredible documentarian. He's made a lot of films and series about British society, politics and economics, focusing largely on the motivations of a few influential people. He has some brilliant insights. If you want a brutally honest appraisal of the last eighty years of British history then Curtis is your man. He also made The Century of the Self which, in his own words, is a series "about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." And, most recently, Bitter Lake which looks at the ways that politicians take complex world events and simplify them into an easily processed narrative of "good vs. evil", as well as the West's relationship with Saudi Arabia and "the war on terror". A lot of these are available on youtube and Bitter Lake is currently available on BBC iPlayer.
I watch an air crash documentary on average once every 3 days, always have done. I've been watching many riveting documentaries on hitler and the nazi structure and their strategies in world war 2 over the last few months.
Larkin himself reading "Aubade"? I must watch this! On a tangent, I remember, having completely forgotten the second poem we'd studied for my Higher English (Scottish equivalent of A-Level), I wrote about "Aubade" in the exam. I'd never been taught to analyse "Aubade", but I somehow managed a 90% (or was it 94% - I forget) A on that paper, and an A on the exam overall. I'd pulled off something similar at Int 2 (GCSE) - it'd completely slipped my mind what the text we'd studied even was, so I wrote about "Ambulances". Another high-percentage A. Larkin must be my lucky charm.
Twinsters An endearing adventure of a young woman who found out she had a twin out there in the world. It documents their story as they got to know one another. Gets you right in the feels. I guess it hit me pretty hard, because I have a half sister out there who I never met.
Ah, I love the short ones, but I will watch anything that tickles my fancy. Though the shorts are so much better.
