Review – Hiroshima (2003)

This two-part BBC production follows the final stages of the Manhattan Project up to the dropping of the bomb on the title city. Back in 2003 they were still able to find several people on the American and Japanese sides willing to talk about their experiences, and the dramatic reenactments were a good complement to the interviews. Worth seeing

Review – Grey Matter

One of the items on the Nazis’ long list of vile crimes was the murder of disabled and neurodiverse children. Hundreds of these kids were killed in Austria’s Spiegelgrund “clinic” under the supervision of Heinrich Gross, who added to his crimes by preserving the children’s brains and other body parts in jars. If your workplace gets a betting pool going about the year when the government finally acknowledged what happened and agreed to give the remains proper burial, be sure to put your money on 2002. That’s also the year that filmmaker Joe Berlinger made this movie about the situation and sought an interview with ancient-but-not-yet-dead Gross. Spoiler alert: I was relieved that they couldn’t track him down, as he would doubtless have simply claimed to be unable to remember what he’d done (a lie he’d told in court in the past). His victims deserved to be memorialized without granting their killer any screen time at all, so I’m sorry they even tried to find him. Beyond that this is a powerful documentary about an important subject. Worth seeing

Review – The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout

This is basically Downwind with less time for Native Americans and way more information about The Conqueror. To be sure, nuclear test fallout remains an important topic. And The Conqueror was a creative failure that should never have been made. But honestly the latter does little more than add a dumb twist to the former. Mildly amusing

Review – 15 Minutes of Shame

Monica Lewinsky narrates this exploration of the often-disastrous consequences of unintentionally getting caught up in controversies, especially in the age of social media. The production provides excellent background information about how the system works. My sole misgiving about this is that the case studies seemed oddly off point. The first guy was making money reselling on Amazon, a pastime he might easily have avoided, especially when it drew him into the middle of the hoarding and profiteering scandals of the COVID pandemic. The second subject tells a better story, the only problem being that he would likely have told the same story as a cover if he’d been malicious rather than careless. The final example – and the saddest of the three – was in fact minding her own business when she ended up in the crosshairs of internet scum. But she wasn’t being shamed for anything. She was being attacked for being Black, which was both true and not shameful. Though I appreciated the information and analysis, I’d love to see this remade with a different set of demonstrations. Mildly amusing

Review – Chiefsaholic

Xaviar Babudar had it all: a fanatical love of the Kansas City Chiefs, an active social media presence, a powerful passion for high stakes gambling, and a willingness to rob banks to fund his habits. Stir in a bail jump followed by a cross-country chase, and you’ve got enough for a two hour documentary, more or less. Mildly amusing

Review – The Evils Surrounding Elvis

Because “The Dumbasses Surrounding Elvis” wouldn’t have been a clever anagram? Yeah, dating underage girls is plenty creepy. The rest of this is run-of-the-mill behavior, especially for a wealthy man who could afford to indulge his vices with the assistance of a coterie of sycophants. Nor is any of this new information. See if desperate

Review – Satan Wants You

This documentary does a solid job of uncovering the roots of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, a time when a fraudulent “memoir” called Michelle Remembers convinced gullible evangelicals that the world was beset by a vast army of child-murdering Satanists. The whole thing would be funny if it hadn’t served as an excuse to ruin a lot of innocent people’s lives. The production also does a good job of reminding viewers about how often the perpetrators of this sort of thing are truly awful people. Mildly amusing

Review – H.H. Holmes: Original Evil

Yes boys and girls, if you can download public domain and royalty free video clips and reword a couple of Wikipedia entries, your project can show up on Amazon Prime Video. The result features a lot of silent movie clips that have nothing at all to do with the narrative. It also spends a bizarrely long time covering the crimes of Jack the Ripper before making the obvious point that Holmes couldn’t possibly have committed them. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering about the distinction between a wealthy and powerful content provider that carefully curates its offerings and YouTube except you’re paying for it. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Downwind

This documentary about nuclear fallout takes an excellent first step and then falls flat on its face. Obviously the real tragedy of the government’s testing of atomic weapons is its deadly effect on anyone unfortunate enough to be downwind when radioactive debris falls back to earth. If they had to pick just one group of victims, it makes perfect sense to start with the indigenous people who were removed from their own land and then irradiated where they were forced to settle. But from there the production moves on to other casualties – particularly the Hollywood folk who worked on The Conqueror – who the producers must have thought would be more relatable to white audiences. The story also largely omits key elements of the lethal farce, particularly the sheer uselessness of the testing. This isn’t a bad movie, but it could have been a lot better. Mildly amusing

Review – Call Me Miss Cleo

As I imagine a lot of audience members will, I went into this experience with a “ho ho that fake psychic on TV met a bad end” attitude. But the real behind-the-scenes story paints a much different picture. Youree Dell Harris, the actor who played Miss Cleo, got a super raw deal from the scam artists running the psychic 900 number. In addition to getting screwed over financially, the gig pretty much ruined her life. So this wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. Mildly amusing

Review – Poisoned Ground

American Experience takes us back to the Love Canal, complete with the full parade of terrible decision-making that led to so many people dead or seriously ill. I was particularly taken with the point at which the angry families took EPA officers hostage. It seems so extreme now, though I guess in the shadow of the Iranian hostage crisis that it must have been more in keeping with the times. If you don’t know much about the whole mess, this is an excellent introduction. Worth seeing

Review – Brandy Hellville

This documentary does a good job of criticizing fashion trend op Brandy Melville for being exploitative, environmentally destructive and extremely prejudiced. What it fails to do is distinguish its subject from other, larger clothing manufacturers that use the same terrible labor practices, lead to the same waste and encourage the same despicable body shaming. Though there are plenty of important points here, please don’t go into the viewing experience (or leave it) thinking that it’s about some isolated rogue element in an otherwise squeaky clean industry. Mildly amusing

Review – Weird Al: Never Off Beat

If you’ve read Weird Al’s Wikipedia page, you probably already know most of this. And if you do a Youtube search for the artist, you’ll get most of the clips too. So all this really does is collect them in one place. Mildly amusing

Review – Last Call

The subtitle “When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York” somehow implies that this hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since, which of course isn’t accurate. Still, the murders committed by Richard Rogers back in the 1990s provide some food for thought about the question of people that law enforcement does and doesn’t care about, particularly the older, closeted victims who might otherwise have been a priority for the police. Especially noteworthy are the efforts of the LGBT+ community to force homophobic authorities to do their jobs. Mildly amusing

Review – The Eugenics Crusade

Just in case anyone needs a reminder (or worse, this is new information to you), the Nazis didn’t invent eugenics. This installment of American Experience documents the monstrous philosophy’s heyday in the United States prior to World War Two. Though we didn’t make it all the way to death camps here, things were still plenty bad for awhile (and parts of the madness linger still). The documentary does a solid job of covering the rise, the fall and the issues that came up while eugenics held sway. Worth seeing

Review – The Greatest Night in Pop

I was working a graveyard shift job in the spring of 1985, which meant I spent hour after endless hour with Top 40 radio for company. So when “We Are the World” went into high rotation, it didn’t take long for it to go from charming effort at doing good to grating ear worm that got played at least once an hour. That said, it’s legitimately a moment of moderate importance in the history of popular music. In that spirit, it’s interesting to learn more about the night dozens of celebrities ended up in the same room singing the same song at the same time. Mildly amusing

Review – Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It

I’ve been a big fan of Rita Moreno going all the way back to watching her on The Electric Company when I was a kid. I still remember how delighted I was to discover that she’d had a whole career in movies before then (not to mention plenty of work since). This documentary shows her as a great person behind the scenes as well. Of course that makes it all the harder to learn about the systemic racism and sexual assault she was forced to deal with. But overall this is an upbeat account of a fascinating life. Worth seeing

Review – The Devil on Trial

This documentary covers the real murder that supplied the story for the third Conjuring movie, the ridiculous case of a defendant who sought acquittal based on the notion that he was possessed by a demon at the time of the crime. I both loved and hated the decision to wait until the end of the movie to let one of the interviewees tell the truth about the whole mess. Mildly amusing

Review – Love Has Won

This is what happens when McDonalds managers take ecstasy. It’s weird to see the philosophies, mannerisms and facial expressions of the Manson Family, People’s Temple and their ilk reflected in a cult that doesn’t kill anyone other than its own founder. Over the course of three episodes of this HBO docuseries, Amy Carlson (a.k.a. Mother God) assembles a collection of people approximately as broken as she is. The group’s live streaming and home remedies business supply its leader with enough colloidal silver to turn her skin blue and enough alcohol for her to drink herself to death. Needless to say, the final episode is hard to watch. Mildly amusing

Review – Memory: The Origins of Alien

Alien was one of my powerful movie obsessions when I was a kid, and it remains my favorite entry in the franchise (no disrespect intended to the first sequel). So a lot of the behind-the-scenes trivia was stuff I already knew. Still, it was fun to revisit some old memories, see the outtakes and cut scenes, and even learn a new thing or two. Fans should definitely give this a look, and even folks who aren’t passionate about the subject may nonetheless find this interesting. Mildly amusing