A truly fucking scary man.

Haven't had time to update this thread much recently, but here's some more stuff:



CBS Doc following a company in Vietnam, timely in that I'm currently enjoying Ken Burns' doc on 'Nam on BBC4 and fairly recently read through 'Kill Anything That Moves', a depressing history of American atrocities throughout the War that reminds you how routine 'collateral damage' and civilian deaths were for the Yanks. This doc is unedited so it also features some intriguing 1970 adverts, which I always like to see - especially if they come from a time I don't even remember.



It's Hunter S Thompson - what more do you need to know? The name alone is a guarantee of a certain level of entertainment. As I've said before, I really like the old school BBC attitude to documentaries, when they attempted to educate and inform their viewers and license-fee payers and not simply pander to their basest instincts in order to attain ratings. If I were in government the whole of the BBC would be like this, just a relentless attempt to expand viewers horizons. (Which they would invariably fucking hate, and possibly with good reason, after all who am I to tell them what they can and can't enjoy?)



1967 doc and one of the first attempts to treat pop music as something more than just inane pap for immature kids - which is good and bad of course, as frankly inane pap can be fun and all the relentless search for meaning, depth and authenticity in music (and music docs) can be fucking arse-achingly tedious when taken to extremes. I just watched it for the footage and the glimpse of how people thought and felt at the time, also 1967 is a pretty big year for pop music.



Again, it's high-minded and it doesn't treat you like a hopelessly stupid fuckwit who needs to be babytalked and guided by the hand through every single fucking historical event, assuming you'd only just that second discovered it. I like Orwell too, and I like high-minded, slightly off-puttingly serious 70's & 80's BBC documentaries. Occasionally, it does stretch a bit too far into pomposity. It's a five-part series, all on Youtube, if you're arsed. Five part series these days are generally just reserved for some vacuous showbiz cunt like James Corden visiting his favourite childhood chip-shop or some twats cooking a cake.



John Peel narrates a doc about Captain Beefheart, who I'm only vaguely into myself, but still. It's unfortunate that the general tone of the doc was somewhat ruined for me by the five seconds of introduction from bland, asinine 90's non-entity Jo Whiley which was still annoying me at least twenty minutes into the doc. She really got on my nerves at the time, and still does. She just takes everything she touches and somehow renders it middle-brow, safe and naff. I hate how she globbed onto to Peelie at the end of the 90's as a kind of credibility blanket in order to obscure her own awfulness as well. Plus she's got her scruffy DM's up on the mixing desk - get your feet off the fucking equipment you Coldplay-loving twat!



Interesting look into a subculture I neither really remember nor care for. Don't like the music, don't like the clothes, don't like the politics - but yet the idea of time when people would devote their lives to an aesthetic, ideal or subculture sort of appeals to me.



I posted this ages ago, but when it was only available in poor quality and split into a million different parts. I taped it off the telly sometime in the early-to-mid 90's because I'd developed a slightly weird obsession with 70's punk which, in the days before Youtube and easy access to any album that ever existed, was still quite hard to find out about or hear/see. I think I was just a stereotypical boy who liked fast, angry music and hated any slow song on any album ever.

I used to watch 'Sound of the 70's' with my Mum, several years before and it was generally fucking awful, rotten music and appalling clothes all topped off with my Mum's uncool memories: "Marc Bolan? Oooh yer Dad took me to see him in 1971!", "Elton John and Kiki Dee? We had proper music in them days!" etc. When the episode on punk came around, my Mum was immediately horrified. "Turn it off, ooooh I hated that Punk rubbish! Horrible!"

I guess it was the fact that punk came pre-delivered with a promise that my Mum would disprove of it that really sent me scurrying off to Virgin Records in search of cheap CD's of the Buzzcocks, Damned, Pistols and others.

That punk episode of 'Sounds of the 70's' is fucking mint by the way:

Top notch post Larry.

And spot on about BBC. To think the same corporation that produced gems such as those above now gets its knickers in a twist about celebrity ballroom dancing and losing a programme about cake baking.

Has there ever been a greater cultural document about the redemptive power of rock 'n' roll and the agonies of the teenage experience? 

Well, probably. But this is fucking great, a legendary video-diary (remember them?) taking us inside Loughborough's foremost teenage thrash metal band, Manslaughter, in their earliest years (1992), and the wider world of teenage life in those crazy early-90's day's. Just pure quality, from the impromptu street poetry and social commentary, through the joys of fishing (every true rock 'n' roll animal needs to unwind somehow), the state of the World, the mysteries of women and relationships, the quest for spiritual meaning and authenticity, an argument with your Nan about fish, the problems of a shitty drummer and the ongoing daily misery of attending community sixth form in Loughborough circa-1992.

This doc has it all.

EDIT: 'cause the old link was taken down

EDIT EDIT: and again

I finished the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary last week - extremely good stuff, all 10 hours of it!
Nice little moment when I recognised one of the reoccurring interviewees reading passages from a book I had read just this summer and then I clicked it was the author.


It's on the iPlayer at the moment but I dont know how long for.

Just watched Blackfish for the first time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2545118/

Chilling.

A 90's documentary about stalkers. Radio 1 DJ (and co-writer of 'the UKIP Calypso') Mike Read's stalker is a belter. I'm not so heartless and insensitive as to not feel pity and sorrow for these people and they're unfortunate mental health issues, but it's possible to both feel that sorrow and still find large parts of this doc unintentionally amusing.

I hope they all moved on from these obsessions and went on to have better lives post-doc.

The Secret War. Awesome BBC documentary from the 70's about the secret, scientific war that took place during WWII - from radar and navigational aids for night bombing to V-weapons and ULTRA. It features some amazing captured and declassified footage - the radar screen of an RAF raid on Berlin is particularly incredible. It also features some truly excellent 1970's hairstyles and clothing choices from the presenter and some rather more sober and reserved clothing from the assorted, ingenious 1940's scientific bods being interviewed and interrogated.



The Death of Yugoslavia, six-part series. Again another BBC doc from the time when they educated and informed rather than merely patronised us with celebrity self-indulgences and endless shows about household tat and baking. Helpful for those of us like me who are rather hopelessly ignorant of the various elements that led to the catastrophic wars that tore the region apart in the 1990's.



1973 doc about the Manson family. It's rather unlike modern docs in that the interviewees are rather indulged and given free license to air their paranoid ramblings and there seems to be a conscious decision made to 'sex-up' an already unsettling and notorious event. There's some good found footage of the family and some (largely atrocious) home music recordings. It's a bt grim at times, obv.



No Apparent Motive, a 1980's American doc about the-then rather novel phenomenon of serial killers, featuring all your faves - Bundy et al.



The Angry Brigade, Britain's 1970's answer to the Baader Meinhof gang of hairy, lefty revolutionaries (and terrorists). 



Hell's Angels, again from the 70's and again featuring some truly startling sartorial decisions.

Great stuff @LarryDavid.

Cheers.

I've just finished a mini profile on a photographer. I'm going to shamelessly post it here. Right here.

An Open Secret is absolutely worth watching.

pantyfire wrote:

That Secret War doc was fantastic thanks LD.

No probs. It's one of the best, most fascinating docs I've seen, plus to be blunt most of those people are probably dead now so it's great that they got the chance to explain the incredible things they achieved and be acknowledged for their efforts.

Scout wrote:

I just watched the stalker one you posted way back in March, Larry. Highlight was when Mike Reid's stalker sent him a photo of her washing machine with a note on the back that read "this is to prove I own a washing machine - I have named it Mike Reid."

Yeah, it's pretty exploitative as a doc but then it's also hilarious. She turned up on This Morning or something a few years later showing off her homemade Mike Reid clock. She's no master clockmaker but you've got to admire the enthusiasm.

The soundtrack is by Richard Thompson too.

Towards the end when the Luftwaffe was knackered there were still unmolested 1000 bomber raids on some German cities. Borderline war crime in all likelihood. Dresden being a case in point. The London Blitz would largely fall into the same category.

The Americans dropped incendiary bombs on Japanese cities knowing full well the impact on a population living in wooden dwellings.

But it's war, isn't it?

The scale of operations is astounding.

I read a book about RAF bomber command a few years back. 
One thing that struck me was just how dangerous flying itself was then, navigation was rudimentary at best, mechanical failure was common, it was freezing cold, physically demanding/arduous and then you were getting shot at as well.