The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 10:51 am

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Not rated
Date Released to Theaters: October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN: 1591141222

Documentaries made by adult children about their fathers have become a significant new genre.  My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn by the son he never publicly acknowledged.  In Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler trains his camera on his cinematographer father, Haskell.  And in “Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me,” Tessa Blake uses her million dollar trust fund to make a movie about her multiply-married father, Texas oilman Thomas Walter Blake, Jr.  All of these films, in their way, are about secrets.  But this film, about the head of the CIA, is about family secrets and national security secrets, too.  Can a man whose job is keeping secrets share enough of himself to be a good father?  Does a man who loves secrets even want to be?  “I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt,” says his son, Carl.

Part family story, with insightful comments from the woman who was wife to the movie’s subject and is mother to the movie’s director and part “Fog of War”-style exploration of America’s role in post-WII international affairs with a Who’s Who of Cold War policy-makers, this is a riveting and important film that does not rest too heavily on the connection between its subject’s personal emptiness and the moral failures Colby would come to regret.  He kept so many secrets he lost touch with the reasons.  Its elegiac tone concluding in Colby’s mysterious death — alone — in a boating accident, ties together the sense of personal, professional, and national loss.

 

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Documentary Movies -- format Spies
Blog Action Day: Food

Blog Action Day: Food

Posted on October 16, 2011 at 7:00 am

 

This year’s Blog Action Day theme is food in recognition of World Food Day.

Some top documentaries about food sustainability and wholesomeness:

1. The End of the Line  The rise of industrialized fishing, the current demand for fish and the methods used to fulfill it are taking an irreparable toll on the world’s oceans.

2. Food, Inc. Corporations and the regulators they control through lobbying put profit ahead of consumer health, the American farmer, worker safety, and even the environment.  Chicken breasts get bigger and produce is genetically engineered not to go bad while obesity, diabetes, and other dire consequences of bad food make more people sick every year.

3. Super Size Me Mordantly funny and trenchantly sobering, this is a Big Mac attack you can sink your teeth into. And then it will bite you back.  Film-maker Morgan Spurlock takes on American fast food culture in general and McDonald’s in particular in this prize-winning documentary.

4. The Future of Food Food growing and production, once the primary occupation of Americans, is now controlled by a few enormous corporations.  This film explores what that means for the quality and health of what we consume.

5. King Corn Two friends grow an acre of corn to see what becomes of their crop in a documentary from director Aaron Woolf.  Corn is America’s most productive and subsidized grain and following an ear of corn from seed to the dinner table has some disturbing surprises.

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Documentary For Your Netflix Queue Lists
Thunder Soul

Thunder Soul

Posted on October 6, 2011 at 6:00 am

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: Middle School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG for brief language and momentary historical smoking
Profanity: Brief mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Smoking, social drinking
Violence/ Scariness: Sad death, reference to off-screen teen violence
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: October 6, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN: B005H4TDNY

A real-life “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” this is the inspiring story of a dedicated teacher who transformed the lives of his students and the gathering 35 years later, when he was 92 years old, to perform a concert in his honor.

No one expected much from the kids who went to Houston’s Kashmere High School in a depressed African-American neighborhood.  But a teacher the kids called “Prof” (for “professor”) showed them they could learn to play music that would take them to a national championship,  international tours, and a recording that would rise the Amazon charts decades later as a CD re-release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaQs9tJtNM0

Prof was Conrad Johnson, Jr.  In the 1970’s, as the Black Power movement was inspiring a reawakening of pride in African-American culture, Prof took the school’s jazz band and added discipline, ambition, and a lot of funk.  One of the documentary’s highlights is the description of the repertoire of the other high school jazz bands of the era — mostly a lot of 1940’s and 50’s standards.  When the Kashmere band, called Thunder Soul, showed up for the national championships in Mobile Alabama with their Afros and their attitude, the only black high school to compete, they caused an uproar.  The judges initially tried to declare two winners but Prof insisted they go back and pick just one.

Prof’s insistence on excellence, his innovative approach, and most of all, his own example inspired several years’ of students to try harder and dream bigger.   The music is genuinely thrilling but the real thrill here is seeing what a great educator can do.  The love he had for music and for his students and the respect they still have for him decades later is powerful and moving.  A feature film about this story is in the works and I hope it will be everything Prof deserves, but nothing will match the heart of the real-life footage, archival and new, of the people who lived it.

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Documentary Movies -- format Music

Metal of Honor — 9/11 Documentary

Posted on September 8, 2011 at 8:00 am

The full-length touching documentary “Metal of Honor” is the story of the ironworkers who arrived as the towers were collapsing and stayed for up to eight months to make sure the area was cleared safely.  It is on Youtube, and is highly recommended as we think of the courage and sacrifice inspired by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-st3r1tkc
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Documentary
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