Need some good documentaries.

[Alex]

Been on a kick with them lately, but i've run out of big name titles.
Blockbuster online, for some reason, doesn't put all it's documentaries under that tab, so i have to manualy search by title, so if you guys know of any good ones (any topic will do), lemme know.

[Infra-Man]

Some of my favorite documentaries:

American Movie - Mark Borchardt and his friend Mike Schank are trying to make a full-length film. As Mark's ambitions crumble under the weight of his big talk, he tries to make a short film instead. This documentary follows the trials and tribulations in Mark's life as he tries to complete the short film. A lot of my friends find this one depressing, but I think it's a really moving depiction of a guy going after his dream. It's also one of my favorite movies.

The Cruise - Speed Levitch is one quirky, tripped out guy prone to waxing philosopical and poetic about New York City. If anything, that makes him the perfect guided bus tour guide. This doc chronicles Levitch's life and gives people an idea what his bus tour was like.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. - Can't go wrong with an Errol Morris doc. This one concerns Leuchter, an engineer who developed/improved devices for capital punishment. Leuchter is then called in to research Nazi concentration camps in a trial involving a holocaust denier. Using bad research methods and specious reasoning, Leuchter eventually buys into Holocaust denial. Interesting portrait of a deluded man. Definitely also check out other Morris docs like The Thin Blue Line (about a wrongful conviction in Texas), Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (about how genius manifests itself in similar yet different ways), and The Fog of War (which centers around the hard lessons learned by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara).

Lost in La Mancha - A must for Terry Gilliam fans, the movie shows the total failure of Gilliam's production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It's heartbreaking but fascinating and makes me love Gilliam's work even more than I already do.

Capturing the Friedmans - The film follows the sexual deviance and pervsion perpetrated by Arnold Friedman, a man who, with his son Jesse, allegedly molested children during his private computer class. The dissolution of the Friedman family and their heat ache is told using their own home video footage.

[K'Nort]

Can you search Netflix without a membership? They group all their documentaries together. Plus they have a ton of subcategories.

I second the recommendations for American Movie and anything by Errol Morris. (He's working on Abu Ghraib now, by the way.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_documentaries

[Conn Seanery]

Baraka. A visual masterpiece.

[Kirayoshi]

Murderball, about quadriplegics who play wheelchair rugby. Powerful stuff, well presented, and makes the principal players a lot more accessable.

[BoosterBronze]

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: About groundbreaking historian Howard Zinn.

Lalee's Kin: A documentary about poverty in Louisiana (EDIT: I apologize... Mississipi, I can never keep Deltas straight)... it blew me away.

[Infra-Man]

Another one that may be worth checking out:

Overnight - The film follows Troy Duffy, the writer/director of home video cult hit The Boondock Saints, as he self-destructs and acts like a total douchebag to his friends, his family, and the people who care about him. It's a cautionary tale about an egomaniac gone wild. It's a well made doc, but I admit that I enjoyed it mostly for schadenfreude value (then again I'm one of the few people in my age group who thinks Boondock Saints is a crap movie).

[The Batman]

I recently saw Why We Fight which I really enjoyed. Also, the Macnemera doc Fog of War was interesting.

I've always enjoyed the Ken Burn's Civil War and Jazz docs too though they're admittedly a little less current and maybe compelling than some of the more recent ones that other people have listed.

[ragnarok_2012]

I'm a big fan of documentaries, Alex. Here are some ideas:

*This Film is Not Yet Rated: a guy decides to hire a private eye to figure out who exactly rates films and how they go about doing it. He interviews several filmmakers (who are all rather critical of the US rating system), figures out who does the rating, and there are all sorts of surprises along the way. I think it's quite fun to watch him as he submits an early version of his documentary to the MPAA ratings board.

*The Yes Men: a group of political activists pretend to represent GATT (i.e., free trade). Hillarity ensues.

*Why We Fight is a good antiwar documentary.

*Sir, No Sir is another one (this one is about the Vietnam War).

*Super Size Me is quite good.

*I hear Orson Welles' F for Fake is very good, though I have yet to watch it.

[Dr. Banner]

Predator.

Best documentary ever.

[LtMarvel]

Grizzly Man (about a guy who volunteered to live among bears and filmed them for school kids)

March of the Penguins will make you thankful that you are not a penguin.

Planet Earth was just on Discovery and now on DVD. This was an amazing series as the filmmakers deliberately set out to get footage no one ever had before.

Wordplay, about the NY Times crossword puzzle and their devoted fans/competitors.

Spellbound about the National Spelling Bee (I went to graduate school in the same town of one of the regional finals).

When We Were Kings about a legendary Ali fight.

Panet Earth and March of the Penguins would look best on one of them fancy dancy HDTVs...

[Infra-Man]

*I hear Orson Welles' F for Fake is very good, though I have yet to watch it.

F for Fake is really fun. It's so quirky and whimsical, like getting into this winding conversation with Welles about fakery that goes on separate but related tangents. A lot of the fun comes from the metafictive elements that Welles incorporates in the film.

---

Also, Alex, if you dig Wordplay and Spellbound, you might as well check out Word Wars, a documentary on Scrabble players. It's basically the same formula, i.e., meet people, they compete. Spellbound is still the best of these word competition docs since it set up the formula. I'm hoping the next documentary on word-based interests balks this format and does something differnet.

[ultramandingo]

crumb - the super creepy comics legend and his wacked out family

[Sabrina_Fried]

I'll second the nomination for Planet Earth, especially if you like nature films.

If you are looking for something more political, I'm not sure if this one is even available on DVD anywhere, but there is a partially-Canadian made documentary from about 3 or 4 years ago now called Oil:The World Over a Barrel, which looks at the status of life in oil producing countries like Nigeria and discusses the politics behind oil pipelines and things like that. It shows up on the CBC every few months, since they helped fund it.

Sabrina

[BoosterBronze]

Another one that may be worth checking out:

Overnight - The film follows Troy Duffy, the writer/director of home video cult hit The Boondock Saints, as he self-destructs and acts like a total douchebag to his friends, his family, and the people who care about him. It's a cautionary tale about an egomaniac gone wild. It's a well made doc, but I admit that I enjoyed it mostly for schadenfreude value (then again I'm one of the few people in my age group who thinks Boondock Saints is a crap movie).

Seriously, that movie was a trip and a half. I mean, does this guy NEVER for one second realize what an ass he is?

(and on a small personal note, I was about 25 yards away from the scene in the end, where a car almost hits the dude at the Palm Springs Film Festival.)