Documentaries

Seakazoo

Last night I watched "The Life and Mind of Mark Defriest." It's "Making of a Murderer" but with a happy ending.

Wow I was just on Amazon prime video and watched

NOVA season 5,episode 7 The Spy Factory

It was about the intelligence network and how the NSA, FBI, and CIA failed to communicate and coordinate with each other with the information they had on the 9/11 plot.

The NSA had the Intel on who, where and when the terrorists came into the states and their communication with the central plotting station in Yemen, but they didn't share that with the FBI. Very interesting documentary on the inner workings of the clusterfuck that resulted in failure to stop anything in time.

It reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill when Peggy gets duped into making foot fetish videos.

Maybe it says something about me as a person, but I'm so confused that there are people who don't realize it's porn. Dudes tickling other dudes tied to a bed is so obvious, right?

Don't feel like starting a full review thread for this 


Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World(8/21/2016)

Werner Herzog is someone that I’m happy is making movies today but who I also tend to approach with a certain amount of skepticism. It’s not that there’s anything about his films that have made me question them exactly but Herzog is such a larger than life figure that I sometimes worry that fans get a little too wrapped up in his cult of personality and maybe over-rate his actual films because of this… or maybe that’s an unfair way of looking at it. For those who don’t know, Herzog is a German filmmaker who’s been making films all over the world for almost fifty years at this point and there have been all sorts of colorful stories about the crazy things he’s encountered while making them. He’s not necessarily a master craftsman and his screenplays aren’t necessarily great literature unto themselves, he’s nonetheless able to inject all his projects whether they be scripted features or documentaries with his grandiose worldview. Especially when he’s in documentary mode he makes a lot of grand pronouncements and to watch one of them is to almost feel like you’re in the presence of some kind of mad genius whether or not the film is itself brilliant. Perhaps if a film is effective at conveying a director’s personality and that personality is fascinating and entertaining that alone should be good enough to make the film great and I should stop being so suspicious but at the same time I do think it’s worth being a little on guard just the same rather letting one’s opinion of the man completely cloud one’s opinion of the films.

Herzog’s latest documentary (which is basically a video essay of sorts) is, oddly enough, one that has less of Herzog’s (literal) voice than we’re used to hearing in his non-fiction works. The subject this time around is the internet and other forms of 21st Century technology and their effects on society. We hear from early pioneers of the internet, Silicon Valley figures (including Elon Musk), cyber-security experts, and some people who feel like the internet has ruined their lives like alleged former internet addicts, people who were made public spectacles after a family tragedy, and people who are allergic to wi-fi signals. Herzog doesn’t do the Michael Moore/Morgan Spurlock thing where he announces that he’s going on a personal odyssey and films himself as he travels to these various interviews. Rather the various interviews come via numbered segments divided by subject and the audience is left to come up with their own through-line for the whole thing.

It is notable that Herzog himself takes a bit of a backseat in this one. We certainly hear him asking the occasional outlandish question off screen (E.G. “does the internet dream”) and he does occasionally make an observation or two via narration but not as much as usual. At times it almost feels less like a Herzog more and more like an Errol Morris movie of the Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control variety. Sometimes you get the feeling that he is perhaps injecting himself less because he’s a bit in over his head with this particular subject and doesn’t always seem able to verbally spar with the experts here. He’s said in interviews that he is not personally much of an internet user beyond e-mail, but he doesn’t exactly seem like a total luddite here. As the title would suggest he seems to be in awe of what we’ve created albeit sometimes a frightened awe. In particular he worries that, given our dependence on the internet, the results could be disastrous if the whole system came crashing down and he cites the Carrington Event of 1859 (a solar flare that would have had an EMP like effect had it happened today) as an example of something that could do just that.

Ultimately I do kind of wish there was more Herzog in this Herzog movie. I started out this review suggesting that I was a bit weary of Herzog making his personality the main attraction of his movies, but it’s pretty clear that that’s the schtick that’s worked for him and I kind of missed it a bit here. Whenever his voice does come into this movie it almost immediately adds energy to the proceedings and I would have liked more. As it stands Lo and Behold, Reveries of a Connected World is neither the best Herzog movie nor the best movie about modern technology but it is an interesting watch nonetheless. Definitely worth watching if it ever shows up on Netflix or something, but I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to the theater for it necessarily.

*** our of Five

Musk is not a huge part of the movie, I wouldn't go expecting a whole lot of him.  He has made a fiction movie with Nicole Kidman recently which was not well received and barely got a release.  He also has another movie called Salt and Fire with Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal that will apparently be screening at the Toronto Film Festival.  Before that his last scripted movies were in 2009 when he released Port of Call New Orleans and something called My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.  

Seakazoo

The Amanda Knox documentary is fantastic. Netflix should do ones for other media-crazed trials.

Audrie & Daisy is pretty good too.

Scott Peterson? He went fishing the day his wife went missing and then body washed up right there days later.
He showed zero emotions a vigils (and in fact told Frey he was in Paris over the phone while at the vigil) , zero interest in searching for her. There were many inconsistencies in his story to the police. He was also ready to sell her stuff including her car and the house like she was coming back .

When the police arrested him he had gotten ready to escape by packing his car he bought in his mother's name. He told them he was on his way to play a round of golf with his father and brother, but this was what was in his car:

approximately $15,000 in cash
four cell phones
multiple credit cards belonging to various members of his family
an array of camping equipment, including knives, implements for warming food, tents and tarpaulins and a water purifier
nine pairs of footwear (shoes, boots, flip flops)
several changes of clothing
a T-handled double-edged dagger
a MapQuest map to Frey's workplace (printed the previous day)
a shovel
2 ropes
200 blister packs of sleeping pills
Viagra
his brother's driver's license

Some of those items were a kill kit for Amber Frey since she double crossed him with the police.

His hair and goatee were also bleached blond. The said that that was because he went swimming in his neighbor's pool and the chlorine changed his hair, but that neighbor said Peterson had never been in his pool.

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence and only a Hair they found on the boat, but the guy was acting shifty as a snake without the need to if he were innocent.


Many trials don't have all the fancy forensic evidence that puts TV criminals away, but it's the preponderance of the evidence that puts most people away. It's at least more likely that he did it than not.



Defense did not show a reasonable doubt , they hung their hat on the thought that a prostitute that stole some checks from the house killed Lacy, but the police never thought that, plus the checks were stolen after she was murdered. They also tried to get a forensic person to testify she died later than she did, but that also fell through.

A lot of people are suggesting they should do one on Casey Anthony. 

The Witness on Netflix. It's about the Kitty Genovese case. Great stuff.