OT: Great Documentary Films?

[72gmc]

^^^ Michael's interview with Rick Beato was also good. If yacht rock is your super power, may as well flex it as much as possible ...

[alessandro]

Originally Posted by quickfeet

It’s blowing my mind that a Sunday In Hell is the only cycling documentary 5 pages into this thread so I’ll do it justice.

Cyclocross: all three have been watched at least a few dozen times on the trainer
9 Ball Diaries
Transition 1 and 2

Road:
The road uphill-follows the 2011 Leopard-Trek team
The quest
Overcoming (dopers delight)
Wonderful losers

MTB:
24 Solo
Off road to Athens
Won’t back down (Steve peat story)
The circus- if you have even seen this VHS and remember it we would probably be instant friends!

Outside bikes pretty much any Patagonia films doc gets me wound up
Damnation
Jumbo Wild
Artifishional

A Sunday in Hell director Jurgen Leth also did Stars and Watercarriers, about the 1973 Giro, starring Eddy Merckx, Felice Gimondi, Francesco Moser, Roger De Vlaeminck, and others. Leth did not have much of a story in mind when he approached this project--it's kind of low-budget and episodic, told in 10 "chapters," but it's a really interesting look at that era of cycling, cafe raids and all. Pez has a good description here:

https://pezcyclingnews.com/features/...o-film-review/

The film: https://youtu.be/vQ0pUiTXV40?si=SJUcLOy8lPD_OHca

A short from that same period, if you haven't seen it, is Louis Malle's Vive Le Tour: https://youtu.be/wiWQ6dAVzy8?si=gDRE3ZFbKDdKs0sm

[alessandro]

Other sports docs:

The Birth of Big Air, 30 for 30 film about BMX pioneer Mat Hoffman. He was just a few years too early for the period of televised extreme sports popularized by the X Games on ESPN etc., but he was out there trying to do amazing **** before just about everybody else, such as getting 25 feet of air above a 25-foot ramp that he built himself at home in Oklahoma. Among other things: He experiments with putting a weed whacker engine on his bike, to get more speed for the run-in, but said it threw the balance off, and also that it was just too janky, even for Oklahoma. And among the many times he hurt himself, he calls an ambulance, asks the cost when it arrives, and then sends it away because the price is too high. Good times.

100 Foot Wave, a six-part series on HBO about the career of surfer Garrett McNamara and his quest to surf the huge waves in Nazare, Portugal. Not sure about this but I think McNamara helped to make this place a big-wave surfing destination. Also fascinating to me is that the producers spent years with McNamara and his family making this series--the thing about documentaries is that you don't necessarily how they'll turn out when you start the project. It's on Max, aka HBO.

[alessandro]

One more: Wild Wild Country, on Netflix. A six-part series about the absolutely bat****-crazy story of the 1980s, when the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers, the Rajneeshees, buy 80,000 acres of sagebrush and scrub in eastern Oregon and start building their own community. Things do not go well. A really well-made series about the nature of good and evil, with interviews with Rajneeshees, townspeople, and local ranchers, one of whom is a Nike heir.