I watch a lot of nature documentaries, but space is my jam. I don’t know what it is about that endless, mindbendingly expansive void that surrounds us that fascinates me. But it does. Anyways, I watched Cosmos with Neil Degrasse Tyson, who’s basically the James Brown of the science world. It went over the various wonders of our universe. Most of the stuff I knew already but I’m sure there’s stuff in there I don’t. I didn’t watch the whole series but I might come back to it one day. If you like space, or just the Neil man, then it’s for you.

I liked how we don’t learn what Sterling (the former convict who was gettingthe ride) did to get his sentence. We don’t need to know. He’s starting his life over from scratch. It’s behind him and he’s trying to get his life together. A common thing that ex-cons face is people throwing what they did in their face over and over again. So that was just a lil’ something I appreciated.

This movie follows the super gentrification of west Chelsea in Manhattan. It’s actually kind of crazy, it focuses on one intersection in particular. On one ide of the street you have Avenues, a private K-12 school that opened up in 2012 that has an annual tuition upwards of 40,000$. On the other side of the street is a projects housing complex that’s home to 2,500 people, most of which are working poor. The documentary follows families from both sides of the streets. Students who go to avenues, and kids who live at Elliot houses (the projects). It was kind of refreshing when students from Avenues recognize that they’re more privileged and have far more opportunities than those across the street. None of that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric. The movie also goes around taking the viewpoint of gentrification to several different people. Those who profitted from it and those affected by it. It also does a take on New York city and how it’s driving the working poor out. I, personally, am disgusted by the total disregard developers can have to the people of this city, but what’re yo gonna do? It’s an hour and 10 minutes I think. I saw it on HBO but the whole thing’s on youtube so there’s that.

I saw this expository documentary on HBO, it followed the murder of 17yr old Jordan Davis. On Black Friday 2012, down in Florida, he and middle-aged Micheal Dunn had argued over the volume of music that Jordan was playing from his car. Micheal, using the classic excuse “feared for his life” shot ten bullets into the car of the three unarmed teeangers, most of which hit Jordan Davis. Filmmaker Marc Silver followed Jordan’s friends who were in the car with him and his parents. Interviewing them about Jordan, just letting the viewers know what he was like. I think he also interviewed Micheal Dunn’s girlfriend but it might have been fottage from something else. The documentary also went over the first trial, of which he was aquitted. The film followed the mother and father as they sued again, and garnered awareness. One scene that tugs the heart strings is when the father told a story about how Trevaun Martin’s dadd called him and said “Welcome to the club no one wants to be in.” This doc is 85 minutes long and I highly reccommend it. free if you got HBO.

planet earth is one of, not only mine but my family’s, favorite documentary series. In my family we all have an appreciation for the various sciences, but we love natural sciences the most. my dad had bought the complete dvd set and we all got around to watch it one day when we got snowed in by a blizzard. The documentary is the standard i hold to all nature documentaries. There’s never any signs of humans, or their tampering, and the narration is in post, so that you don’t have to hear a man talking through the elements. While the primary focus is the animals in the environs they go to, they also go over plant life, or the general conditions of said place; leaving no spare detail untold. it encapsulates everything about life in general, and the cinematography of it all is enough to make you weep. You can find on Netflix, or that this link here. I usually put in at night to fall asleep cuz I’ve seen it so many times.

I was a kid when i saw this film, (X) so i couldn’t really discern fact from fiction. the movie presented itself as a documentary, but upon reflection i now realize it was all staged, nevertheless it’s a sort of mockcumentary. The people in it are on a search for dragon fossils and they conveniently find a dragon’s body preserved in ice. Then while dissecting and examining the body, they go over the science of how dragons would’ve existed. From the way they fly, to their behavior in mating seasons. As a kid I thought it was pretty cool, and I still do, but it really is just a documentary about dragons with staged up prop for it. Still, it it’s a good hour and a half long documentary, that peaked a love a science in me to this day. I highly recommend it if you know any little kids that like science, dragons, or both!