#111 - Smoke Show Vol. 2 Thoughts On Docs
or: opinion round up time let's goooooo
I watch a lot of documentaries.
Sometimes they have my full attention, other times they are on as I clean, write, or play video games (shout out to Dragon Quest 11 for being the most fun I’ve ever had replaying a game…ever!).
One of the main reasons I love documentaries so much is because I’m nosy and love to learn weird little details about ~situations. Financial crimes, sports docs, history, celebrity puff pieces! Basically, anything except True Crime because I live alone and am a scardey cat and often find it exploitative of the victims especially now during The Boom it’s currently going through. Due diligence or bust!
But I rarely write about any (besides the ones about The Beatles apparently) so here’s a bunch of reviews/thoughts on ones I’ve watched recently and yes this got way longer than originally anticipated but I spent the past weekend in full marathon of information mode SO, here we go!
I have also decided to rate them on a 1-5 scale based solely on how fun they are to watch while high!
Oasis: Supersonic - HBO Max
Oh man, this documentary made me sad.
Sure, there are other members of Oasis, but it’s all about Liam and Noel innit? And it’s just watching two brothers achieve getting out of their own way just long enough to make something so incredible/unbelievable incredibly quickly and have a miserable time doing it.
It’s nice to know that there was another band of cheeky Brits who didn’t give a fuck about the media and sold a ton of records and gave us some of my favorite songs of all time (they play a weirdly fast rendition of Champagne Supernova during the film and it felt like the world was happening at 1.5x speed oh my god I never want to hear it again!) and god Wonderwall still hits.
I don’t think it’s one I’d ever watch again, I think there were some interesting bits but it was an extremely melancholy documentary in the way that all documentaries about men who would clearly benefit from understanding their emotions even just a teeny tiny bit always are.
Like they say really explicitly that they “never had to say ‘I love you’” to each other because it was “telepathic” and like IDK BOYS I think it might have helped maybe! There was clearly some access to emotional vulnerability because you don’t get those lyrics otherwise!
The best part is Liam getting snippy with Letterman and watching them smoke cigarettes because they’re incredible smokers.
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (great music, bummer subject matter, but you feel cool smoking to Oasis so that’s doing some heavy lifting ratings wise)
Tour De France: Unchained - Netflix
So, in terms of random special interests, I would say my Lance Armstrong/doping in cycling/corruption of major sports/The Tour is certainly one of my more, uh, specific ones.
(I love a good Lance doc because it always just barely scratches the surface of the fascinating intersection he occupied of Sports Hero, Cancer Survivor, and Massive Liar. (And I think it’s interesting that so few of the documentaries really want to interrogate how he weaponized misogyny to evade being caught for so long because he besmirched the women who came forward to challenge him in increasingly vile ways!) I would recommend Stop At Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story and the 30 For 30 episodes if you’re looking for suggestions, both are better than the Alex Gibney doc—I find Gibney annoying and navel-gazey. Who cares that Lance lied to him he lied to everyone?! And that critique extends to most Gibney docs, except the Enron one, which isn’t bad for that reason but was made too quickly post-scandal and missed the shocking information that came out after and now no one has picked up this mantle and made an Enron miniseries to which I ask: why!)
The thing about The Tour De France is I think it’s genuinely irresponsible to pretend as if doping isn’t a massive part of cycling history and this documentary even follows Jonathan Vaughters’ current team, so if they were going to talk about the efforts to make cycling a clean sport, Lance’s former teammate who was coerced into doping and has since become a clean team coach would have been the perfect person to tie that narrative to!
The best part of this documentary is one of the most exhilarating tracking shots I’ve ever seen of one of the cyclists bombing a hill and doing some of the most impressive riding put to film. The conversation that followed about how all riders today are better and more well-rounded than any cyclists in history got me thinking again about the advancement of sport as coaching techniques and information is more widely available. But also like, not a single mention of motor doping? (The silliest name for a serious problem that cycling never ever wants to address?)
Overall I thought the doc was weirdly organized and that made it hard to follow. I watched the dubbed version and the voice acting wasn’t…amazing. Also, the only person they didn’t dub was a child, which I just found funny. The Tour makes for a great documentary subject but I simply cannot hear another male athlete say that he’s winning “for his wife/girlfriend and kids” No, you’re not! And that’s fine! It’s such a weird lie!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️ (lots of missed opportunities, hard to keep track of who’s who throughout the story—but that hill bomb tho)
The Last Dance - Netflix
Speaking of weirdly organized documentaries, I have once again sat through The Last Dance because I keep (mistakenly) thinking that if I watch it again my brain will finally grasp the timeline that’s presented.
(The flashforward/back baffles me even further when I consider that this originally aired week-to-week on ESPN.)
Michael Jordan is very talented and very mean and basketball used to be a pretty rough sport! It seems like a lot of the posturing done on the team got cattier and cattier over time, so I appreciate that the inside of the Bull’s locker room throughout the 90s probably sounded akin to a tense Real Housewives dinner party scene.
Which helps me understand the appeal of sports! There’s drama and personal conflict involved but it’s cloaked in something acceptably masculine whereas Housewives doesn’t require the cast to perform a separate skill to facilitate the audience witnessing the human interest/captivating part of it all.
Do I care about basketball? No! But I thoroughly enjoy watching people who are Very Good At Things talk about their processes and pressures. I think it’s wild how famous Michael Jordan is/was and I love that he’s pretty unapologetic for what a monster he could be to his teammates. Also, I don’t believe them on the gambling stuff and the way it was handled in the doc just makes me more suspicious tbh!
Also, the fact that he and Steve Kerr never spoke about the fact that both of them had lost their fathers via very strange execution-style circumstances made my brain rattle around in my head!!! I get not sharing that trauma casually with another person but like—damn. Bleak!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (unforgivable editing of the timeline, need more Dennis Rodman In The 90s, men are allowed to be petty as fuck but only about sports which is a delightfully silly realization, MJ wearing non-broken-in original Air’s for his last game at the Garden made me feel weirdly better about all the dumb dumb blisters I’ve gotten over the years!)
Icarus - Netflix
I watched Icarus when it first came out knowing nothing about it besides it being a cycling doc (I clearly can’t get enough of that shit).
It goes from my dream documentary about one man’s quest to determine the benefits of doping regimens in cycling/how easy it is to get away with, only to become a human rights documentary that helps a man escape assassination by the Russian state when his world-renowned anti-doping lab is exposed as a fraud. And it turns out Russia had athletes doping DURING the Olympics (as opposed to the rest of the other teams who cycle off of the drugs for the games) and they won a bunch of medals and it was weird to watch this during the attempted coup last week tbh!
Anyway, this is the best documentary on the list even if I have some “I wish this was shot better and was 10x longer” feedback. I think it offers a very clear perspective of Putin’s ruthlessness and Russia’s desperation for approval, it shows that the Olympics Committee is corrupt, it displays USADA’s complete incompetence, and my only real gripe is that it takes a tad too long to get going and then feels like you’re going 250mph until the end which is an abrupt stop.
Ironic that a movie about cycling has issues with pacing!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (for any/all of its flaws—of which there are many—this is one of the only docs in recent history to lay out Russian corruption and desperation for western approval so clearly, I will be forever grateful for the exposé contained within this doc even when I still want to watch the original concept! The Russian doctor is one of the most heartbreaking figures, I can’t believe the audience watches someone go into Witness Protection in live time after seeing him react to his friends/former colleagues being assassinated by the state. Also hahhahah the scene where the doc maker brings all the evidence to the anti-doping agency and they get more upset about being exposed for their failings than the widespread doping scheme they didn’t catch!)
Pretend It’s A City - Netflix
Look, Public Speaking is better, but I love Fran so much that I’m always happy to spend more time with her way of looking at the world.
The between bits are a bit strange, I think Marty didn’t do his Best Work on this b-roll but a very very solid watch.
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (admittedly, I’ll listen to Fran talk about anything and doubly so when high—even if her story about her friend who smoked weed for fifty years and now can’t string a sentence together rocked me harder than any other anti-weed propaganda ever has!)
The Family - Netflix
Genuinely one of the most important documentaries I’ve ever watched.
I think it frames the problems we’re facing in modern American politics in such a jarringly bare way it blows my mind we’re not talking about it all the time.
Except, I know why we’re not, because the filmmakers made my least favorite choice of using reenactment to illustrate the story and I’m sorry it’s just a very serious subject matter and the goofy little acting interstitials are jarring!
Religious extremism is baked into America’s identity and there is a small, powerful, elite group of religious leaders on the right who are outsizedly powerful and have such undue influence in politics that I know I know I know I know how tin-hatty I sound the second I talk about it but like it’s right there!!
I am going to read the author’s new book though. He’s also a great follow on Twitter for however much longer that site remains active!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️ (not fun to be high for—though it does make the reenactments easier to get through—and a FIVE STAR doc when it comes to the important messages being relayed!)
Blackfish - Prime
I first saw Blackfish in college and was immediately enraptured and wanted to know more about the story, so I bought the book it’s based on A Death At Sea World and was even more horrified but also deeply moved by Orca’s entire existence and matriarchal structure.
Blackfish is harder to watch than I remember. I got real fucking sad watching these adults work through their guilt in live-time about their contributions to the detestable organization of Sea World, because I think they genuinely wanted to help the animals, and a lot of them really were torn once they realized what was happening. But if they left their jobs they worried those behind them wouldn’t care for the animals the way they did, and I think it’s easy to feel like you don’t have many options at that point. Quit, or go numb.
(And so many of us are numbing out capitalism because it’s just too heartbreaking to face the reality of what we’ve been cornered into in order to survive.)
There’s a lot going on in terms of corporate greed, criminal negligence, the use of shame as a technique to quell uprisings, and uhhh victim blaming.
The doc spends a lot of time talking about how Sea World victim-blamed the trainers anytime there was an “incident” with a whale, only to go on and have these trainers break down where they thought Dawn Brancheau “went wrong” during her final show. I get why her family is pissed at the portrayal tbh!
It is easier to rewatch knowing that Sea World did end all of its Orca shows and is basically bankrupt, but fuck is it a stark reminder of the impossible choices people have to make in regards to employee demands. And also how cruel we are to animals.
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️ (part of this is just…horrific subject matter is not fun to be high during but ALSO one time I had to go to the woods for a weekend and watch bands perform and someone had a projector and a bunch of VHS tapes from home and I had eaten a homemade edible that tilted my world in weird ways only to have to watch an old Sea World show play behind a guy who was playing deeply sinister music and everyone started tensing & clenching as time went on because we all were like…waiting for a whale attack. It was spooky as shit and will haunt me forever!)
Queenmaker - Hulu
Okay…so this documentary was top of my watchlist because I love the 2008 drama surrounding SocialiteRank.com so to hear there was a doc being made about the NY Celebutante/recently past It Girl era was extremely my shit.
The doc opens strong! Franz Ferdinand soundtrack firmly teleports us back in time. Tinsley is here! Oh my god, Kelly Cutrone!!! The guy from Page 6 that pops up in every single pop culture documentary!
We’re getting facts about the money that went into it, how these girls rose to the top, and the Paris & Nicky to Tinsley Mortimer pipeline explained!
And then suddenly the doc shifts and focuses on one person who wrote blogs about the scene at the time—who was eventually revealed to be a random college student in the midwest and went on to have a weird interaction with The Scene when they came out to NYC for a summer internship at NY Mag.
And if I’m being vague about it—it’s because this person is now living their life as an out trans woman and the doc treats this as a Big Reveal in a way that felt off to me. And then the doc basically becomes about this woman and how much of a fantasy world she lives in. Which, like, could be cool but it just mostly felt sad—I don’t know how much reality is really present in her mind and the filmmaker seems sympathetic but at what point does it become exploitative?
The fourth wall breaks after the director pushes her to answer about a bad relationship/obsession she had that forced her parents into bankruptcy, and then we spiral out from there. And it’s not that her story isn’t interesting, but it’s presented with a tag from her real-life friends that they don’t believe anything she says. So, an unreliable narrator but with real-life consequences? I wasn’t comfortable watching it because I was mostly just concerned for her mental health the whole time.
It’s wild that this documentary pivots so hard into following the narrative about this blogger’s life because like, while interesting, that is not the doc I was watching for the first twenty minutes. Instead, we get a hard left turn into a salaciously-framed human interest narrative that left me feeling worried about the exploitative nature of this documentary.
The informational breakdown talking heads abruptly end (they’re shoved back in at the end to place a bow on top of the mess) to zoom in on this one blogger. But she wasn’t even the only one writing about the It Girls of the moment! There’s certainly a story there—and an interesting one too—but why WHY are so many documentaries promising me a deep-dive look into specific aspects of elitism-based hyper-femme cultures only to pivot to personal-interest stories halfway through? This was my major gripe with Bama Rush too!! Don’t promise an audience something you have no intention of delivering because it sours me on whatever you’re actually trying to communicate!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️ (I get wanting to “do something different” but I would just like to know why no documentaries can take culture that women are interested in as serious enough subjects on their own without having the director feel weirdly invasive/exploitative of their subjects!)
Pretending I’m a Superman: the Tony Hawk Video Game Story - Prime
Tony Hawk Pro Skater was the game in my house growing up, and I’m a big fan of Skater docs (I prefer Bones Brigade to Dogtown & Z-Boys), so this was an easy one to settle into.
It’s a really interesting look into early video game development, the catapulting of skateboarding back into pop culture through The X Games, the creation of celebrities via video games, the significant positive ripple effects of including just even one woman in the lineup, and the cultural significance that no one could have predicted because when art is made by passionate people who get what’s cool about the thing they’re making, the sky is the limit!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (funniest part of this doc is interviews with the bands they got for the soundtracks—that still totally rip, great use of them throughout the doc—and how none of them had any idea what a “video game soundtrack” was and bands were soooo precious/pretentious about licensing in the 90s!)
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn - Hulu
This doc should be way more brutal.
The founder of WeWork is an absolute bullshit artist—but like, not even a good one. He was pretty open about not having a clear vision but speaking in vague terms about “community” while also psychologically torturing his assistant/team whom he made work 80+ hour weeks.
I think it’s a good start, but there is SO MUCH left uninvestigated about the VC Funding world and failing upwards and the lack of regulations, and how Company Culture is mostly lip service these days.
I hate WeWork, I hate what they stand for, I hate most of the companies that rented office space within their glass walls, and I hate seeing the pre-2020 falsehood-riddled millennial work grind culture that we were all subjected to in the name of faux anti-capitalism.
Bosses are not your friends and co-workers are not your family. Do not stay at the office past 5 just because the place you work has free kegs, it’s a ploy! a marketing scheme! unlimited PTO is bullshit!!!
I, for one, am very ready to make fun of the millennial startup vernacular that invaded via WeWork. Unicorns! Ninjas! Gurus! Sprints! Angels! It’s all very very silly and we should laugh at it because omg I know business vernacular has always been goofy but millennials are just so fucking earnest about it!!
Smoke Show rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️ (the opening of the documentary is the founder having a Jack Donaghy “[holding a mug in each hand] feels more natural” style meltdown and it’s honestly very funny.)
Okay! Well, that’s it for now, I’m sure there will be way more coming in the future. If you’ve got any recs let me know in the comments!
(Also I live-tweet a lot of documentaries & make fun casual observations about politics over on Twitter much more regularly now so if you still use twitter, uh, follow me while the site still exists!)
From the vault:
#5 - Oh, the stories these (glass) walls could tell.