Documentary Attack!

I watched some tasty documentaries over the last week and thought I'd share them with y'all.

In no particular order of rollickin' awesomeness:

Discovery Channel - Understanding Time. Very well-produced, funny, slick, and actually of substance (or as much substance as you can have when you're dealing with something as weightless as time). I really enjoyed the unusually flippant tone of this documentary. In one sequence, after a physicist has been hypothesizing about wormholes etc, the narrator's voice-over literally takes over and pokes gentle fun: "Suppose we had a wormhole. Suppose that..." and she goes on. Then suddenly she says, "Suppose we saw Elvis." Awesomely stupendous!

National Geographic - The Life and Legend of Jane Goodall. Fascinating subject matter. Some choice historical footage, interspersed with interviews, explores this complex, brave, heroic, unconventional, iconic and compassionate scientist's life and her thirty year's work studying and understanding chimps.

National Geographic - Marco Polo, the China Mystery Revealed. Blah. Modern day photographer, an amiable enough guy, sets out to follow the route that Marco Polo describes in his famous book, a journey Marco Polo may have in fact never made. Arguments for and against the historical verisimilitude of Marky's travels are sometimes interesting, sometimes trivial-- and the fact that there is no surviving original copy of his text basically means his book can't be considered an authoritative reference, one way or another, casting this whole enterprise into the land of escapism. The photographer-host-dude is clearly having a good time as he visits the various places--but what's up with this guy's libido?? Pretty hilarious actually! Just about every town he visits he's saying something like "Oooh, some attractive women there" or "Let's check out some of the local beauties" etc. Worth watching just for that, but don't expect much compelling entertainment.

No Maps For These Territories. Must watch. (And if you like U2, even more, since it features The Edge and Bono). William Gibson, noted author, is driven around the country in a limousine with no destination, talking, talking. Conversation touches on just about everything. Some great moments have been captured in the corresponding section of http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson.

This quote from the above is priceless:

"I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?"

And I really liked this one too, which I'll leave you to ruminate:

"All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data."