2011 - 4 mins. - So I guess we don't need hearts anymore. 

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2012 - Cute short about the functionality and art of animated GIFs. 

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2009, 10 mins - DoriAnn shares her husband with her biological sister. Her love for her husband is not romantic. Sex is a relious duty. Nevertheless, she's having a HELLA hard time with jealously. Raw.

Watch it now on IndiePix for $1.99 well spent. 

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2010, 9 mins: I Saw You is Seattle's version of Craigslist Missed Connections. In this short lovers who have posted and answered ads tell their stories. Conclusion: some people on the internet are way, way bonkers. Some are cute and will love you forever. 

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2007 - Four year old Marla sells her abstract modern art paintings for thousands of dollars. Is she a the next Jackson Pollack? Or are her parents con artists, creating art under their daughter's name? As the art world turns Marla and her family, director Amir Bar-Lev struggles with his place in telling their story. 

Watch it now on Nexflix. 

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I just stumbled across California is a Place, watched all of these VERY beautifully shot shorts back to back and fell in love hard. The shorts feature skaters using empty pools in the back of foreclosed Fresno homes, Mariachi singers in LA, old ladies on a synchronized swimming team and more.

I loved Uppercut the most, it's about a real life fight club for emasculated deskbound nerds in Silicon Valley. 

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2009, 13 mins: O damn. The largest shopping mall in the world isn't in Minnesota after all. It's in a remote part of China and though it's over 2x the size of the Mall of America, it only has 12 tenants. Watch it. 

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2009, 4mins - LSD was the original performing enhancing drug. This short is a hilarious animated take on a legendary no-hitter thrown by a very high pitcher. 

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2010, 19 mins - In Richmond, Virginia there are moped gangs who take themselves as seriously as real motorcycle gangs. This short is absurd, then funny, then scary. You should watch till the very last hyper-climactic second.

PS, it screened at Sundance and SXSW 2011.

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Between 1969 and 1999 1,000 people mysteriously died in UK police custody. Filmed over five years, Injustice investigates these deaths through the stories of several mourning families futilely fighting for justice. 

In 2001 Injustice was "pulled from cinemas after legal threats from the Police Federation. but the directors have continued to put on samizdat-style screenings ever since," writes Peter Bradshaw. These filmmakers, Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood, have just released the full length film to Vimeo. 

It's a powerful documentary about the failures justice system, and the necessity of community activisim. Watch it now on Vimeo. 

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2009 - An early 1990's PBS documentary made Jesco White famous for "mountain dancing." This doc goes farther and profiles the rest of his self-proclaimed "outlaw" family. The Whites are low income in one of the poorest states in America, so the film is very much about one family's way of getting by in a cycle of depression, violence, incarceration and drug abuse. Their defiance is equally hilarious and heartbreaking.

Watch it now on Netflix. 

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American Juggalo, Sean Dunne, 2011, 23 mins. Juggalos, often-mocked hardcore fans of the Insane Clown Posse meet every August at The Gathering of the Juggalos in Illinois. They refer to fellow Juggalos as family; one says The Gathering is his "one week out of the year to be home."

This sounds just like the language used to describe Burning Man. Fundamentally Juggalos and Burners are quite similar. Each group has found a place to be accepted as themeslves, take drugs and drop out of their regular lives for a few days. It's anthropology. Humans like to be part of a group. 

If you watch Rich Van Every's Burning Man - Dripping in Gold 2011, 4 mins, which has no interviews but still does a great job of showing what the community is like, you'll see the differences too. There is a clear class difference between the groups. Burning Man is very much about art, The Gathering is not. And if we trust the shorts, Burning Man draws many more girls who look like models. 

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2011 - On a summer afternoon in 2008, a suburban supermom on the way home from a family camping trip drives the wrong way up a freeway for 1.7 miles. She crashes her minivan into an oncoming car, killing four children and three adults. Her autopsy reveals that her blood contained THC and double the legal limit of alcohol.

The film is about her husband and sister-in-law struggling to find the truth of what really happened that day and WHY. They can't believe what the facts of the crime suggest - that she simply got drunk and stoned and got behind the wheel. Neither will you. It's a fantastic mystery.

I watched on HBO On Demand. 

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2010 - The Arbor is a documentary which features actors lip synching to interviews with the family and friends of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. It's a tragic story of unlikely success, abuse, trauma, and dysfunction. I'll say no more - you should watch it immediately. You won't be able to take your eyes off the film, it's captivating, inventive and a totally unique take on the dysfunctonal family documentary. 1 million stars. 

Watch it right this second on Netflix. 

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2006 - For the Love of Dolly is about fans with a singular obsession on Dolly Parton. The level of obsession is sometimes funny - one fan's house is stuffed with bedazzled Dolly memorabilia. But it's also compelling and sad to watching people fill up their lives with a relationship that exists almost completely in their minds. You'll like this one if you liked I Think We're Alone now. 

Watch it now on Netflix.

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2007 - You see but rarely notice extras. This cute (shall we say feel-good?) little film profiles several extras with illustrative clips from the films in which they've appeared. Watch after a long day at work and be happy you're not an extra, errr.. "background actor." 

Watch it now on Netflix. Official site. Strictly Background Twitter. 

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Rodman Flender's Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop opens today. You should see it, since it’s equally as funny as Bridesmaids or The Hangover. Isn’t it a bummer that documentaries aren’t ever funny, unless they follow comedians? Tell Herzog to throw a drunken wedding party into his next doc, will you? 

Imagine that the Hangover were non-fiction. It would be an anthropological study of American men in their 30s and typical social groupings; a horrifying tale of drug abuse and organized crime; an account of working single mothers and love. Ugg.  

There are funny moments in documentaries, indeed. But non-fiction tends to subjugate comedy to SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT, about like, how Nike is an asshole, or that nuclear weapons are a big problem these days (no really!), or that Klaus Kinski was a nutcase.

The seminal work on why documentaries can’t be funny should be Ben Steinbauer's Winnebago Man, a good but not funny film about a hilarious video. Yes yes of course, it has funny moments. But I also learned that humor at the expense of another comes at an emotional cost to which the viewer is blind. Leave it to a documentary to deconstruct something funny and calculate the cost of its humor. Sigh. 

Luckily for you and me, there’s a loophole for comedian documentaries. We get to laugh at them. We’re supposed to. The comedians like it! They get paid for it and everything! So go see the Conan film, laugh your knickers off, and don't think too hard. 

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I was outraged watching The Cove, but didn't send $1 to help save the dolphins. I saw Food Inc., and I still buy raspberries in Winter. Does this inaction mean that I should have devoted these movie-watching hours to The Fast and the Furious catalogue? Believe you me, I do wonder. So does Phil Hoad at the Guardian, who questions if this genre of outraged expose documentaries (e.g. The Corporation, Inside Job have any real social impact, since the films rarely provoke any action and mostly preach to the converted.

Pre-converted, I saw Andrew Rossi's Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times last week. The film makes a convincing argument that old school investigative journalism is three things - important, expensive and boring. The New York Times is about to crumble because of Twitter (basically) and We the People need the Fourth Estate of scrappy Woodwards and Bernsteins on the ground from Wall Street to Kabul to hold this shabby little American democracy together. But these heroes and their field offices are expensive and their reports are a real snooze compared to videos of kittens inside ski boots. And to Mr. Hoad's point, so what? Shall I convince all my buddies turn off The You Tube and start daily long-form journalism reading sessions?

The good news is that even if a viewing never leads to direct action, outraged documentaries can shape the way we see the world. Say one day you watched Errol Morris' A Thin Blue Line, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, and Nick Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. The next day you might not begin a crusade against police corruption, corporate skulduggery, or the death penalty. But, you may begin to see American democracy as an sensitive institution, one on which We the People must keep dutiful eyes. Maybe a subtle shift in knowledge rather than active political uprisings is the best we can hope to do with these films.

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So the Dude from the Big Lebowski was based on a real person! He's really not as interesting as you would think (I know, boo). But give it a watch anyway, to see the real life Dude awkwardly stumble through his very unusual variety of fame. 

Watch it here. 

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Watch it now on Netflix or buy the DVD on Amazon. Film by Nicholas Philibert. 

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