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Good documentaries — 10 Comments

  1. I saw the Clarence Thomas documentary featuring my former Creighton classmate, Ginni Lamp Thomas.

    Great. Highly recommended. On PBS later this year.

    Great pixs of Ginni from the 80’s.

  2. I bought the book “Alive” years ago long before the incident was well known. It was riveting, and as usual, when I love a book, I didn’t see the movie. I have the ‘scenes’ in my own imagination.
    I also have been to South America and have had students from Argentina, so, I could picture the scenery.

    Incredible story of survival.

  3. I thought the plane crash scene in the Hollywood version of “Alive” was excellent, with the rest of the film being so-so. I love a good documentary, though many are political junk.

    One I found riveting, but also left me conflicted, was the Duplass Bros. docu on the guru Bhagwan Rajneesh and his followers in Oregon, called Wild Wild Country. It’s way too long at just under 7 hours, but it is such an astonishing train wreck that it mostly held my attention.

  4. Another great oldie that started with a great non-fiction book was “Into Thin Air” about the disastrous climb to the top of Mount Everest. Both Hollywood and documentary films were made. I read and watched them all.

  5. TommyJay –

    I had rather a lot of “intercourse,” so to speak, with the Rajneesh phenomenon, beginning way back, before they were much known here, when I sent an interested letter to Poona, India, and within a couple of months received a long letter in return. But I had decided I wasn’t much interested in his books. I was much more intrigued with Krishnamurti and what remained of Gurdjieff’s teachings — neither of whom seemed to want a mass of followers. Instead, it was more like, “This isn’t for everyone. Maybe it isn’t for you.” This aristocratic, snobbism appeal, interested me more than populism.

    I actually went to a few Gurdjieff meetings here in Portland. And then I told the group, “I’m too much of a flawed vessel by this point.” One young woman in the group broke down in tears, and said, “We’re all flawed vessels here.” I was not unmoved. But I didn’t continue, because they wanted some money. Gurdjieff had said, “No American values anything they don’t spend money on. If it’s free they’ll think it’s worthless.” He was a charlatan, but worthy of study nonetheless.”

    The Rajneeshees became extremely noticeable in Portland and opened their big ambitious commune in Eastern Oregon. Two of my friends, ex-punks, went for the tour. There was a restaurant and hotel across the street downtown, three blocks from the central library. Everybody I knew had to try the food. The Rajneeshees — featuring a high percentage of attractive Germans and Swedes — all wore red clothing of some sort.

    This was during the years when I worked on nightshift in ER. My surrealist short fiction was getting published here and there. I was on the night when somewhat set off an explosion in the Rajneesh hotel. They brought him to us in an ambulance, and I was the first person to interview him. He was surly and uncooperative, which I thought was partly because he’d failed in his mission and was no doubt suffering intense pain, having blown off several fingers of one hand and burned himself — his bomb had gone off in a bathroom while he was setting the charge. I took his wallet, which had conflicting IDs. The cops and our hospital security didn’t like the Rajneesh security guys, who were Swiss, but I showed them the IDs, and they found out very quickly that one of the IDs had recently stayed two nights in a Rajneesh place down in San Diego. I shared this with the Portland police.

    The Rajneeshees were afraid the man was part of a conspiracy rather than on his own, which I found a reasonable concern. But the Rajneesh didn’t make themselves popular with hospital staff or local police. Their representatives were Swiss, German, Scandinavian, who seemed to have no gift for “small talk” or other such friendly overtures, and they stationed themselves outside the ICU 24 hours a day. They even brought their own food and drink.

    Anyway, matters continued to devolve. Sheela seemed to regard us all as peasants, and she had an irritating manner of speaking to the press. I by this point, witnessing Bhagwan in his 24 Rolls Royces and so on, thought the group the equivalent of Scientology or the Moonies or Reverend Jim Jones.

    Anyone reading his books ten years earlier might have realized he was a lightweight, compiling a sort of Readers Digest of such idealistic thought. I was never going to kiss any guru’s feet. Jesus wouldn’t have wanted anyone to kiss his feet, and if you were not going to out-Jesus Jesus then what was your point?

  6. miklos, what am interesting history!

    A friend of mine worked for one of the Everest climbing companies during the “Into Thin Air” disaster. She was supposed to climb with them – not all the way to the summit (one of the reasons behind all the deaths was that you many people were trying to summit at once – no room in the group for mere employers who were not climbing guides) but had to be brought home after a couple of days at Base Camp when it became clear that she was suffering serious elevation sickness.

    So home she came, following the expedition even more closely than she usually would have because of her personal involvement with the guides and clients, and we had front-row seats for all of it. This person hadn’t been heard from since the night before, that person’s body was found, the other person made it back to camp but they weren’t sure if he was going to live… It was horrific.

  7. I highly recommend the HBO series, “Chernobyl”.

    It is a gripping tale of the total insanity that lead to the meltdown, and the cost and heroic actions to mitigate its impact.

    The trial scene at the end is a MUST SEE! The best explanation (and an education) of the cause of the meltdown.

    You can buy the DVD from Amazon — it is a vital educational experience for the whole family (particularly the “social democrat” in your family who does not know their history and who have never heard of the Soviet Union).

  8. That event led to a generation’s worth of cannibal jokes, as I recall. But then I was in middle school and a keen consumer of gross jokes.

  9. Amazing feedback. The thing that struck me about Into Thin Air is that you have a group of people who are highly skilled and smart and not terribly full of themselves, so by all rights there was not any reason at the outset for anything beyond a freak mishap. And yet, there is just a little bit of success breeding laxness; then a tiny bit of hubris, then a little more hubris …

    A surprising feature of the Rajneesh movement was the very broad slice of society that got pulled in. There were highly successful lawyers and wealthy Hollywood executives (or was it just their wives?). The thing that conflicted me about the documentary was how earnest and non-judgmental they were in presenting the Rajneesh defenders. Maybe that was a good a presentation angle and part of what kept me interested.

    “Anyone reading his books ten years earlier might have realized he was a lightweight, compiling a sort of Readers Digest of such idealistic thought.” — miklos000rosza

    Boy, that hit me hard in the docu. This is the Rajneesh philosophy? You gotta be kidding me.

  10. Nat. Geo: Shackleton’s Endurance Story, the greatest survival story I know.

    A youtube search will turn up many other documentaries of this story. I picked this link primarily for its brevity, for the full tale is exceedingly long to tell (books are best).

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