MARC’S PICKS Most Saturday and Sunday mornings, I’m on the couch by 5 a.m., answering emails, organizing my calendar for the upcoming week and watching a documentary film. The best documentaries are insightful and entertaining but can also be amusing, disturbing, inspiring, shocking or infuriating. A great documentary cannot only change the way I think about some people or issues, it can change the way I act or consume. Documentaries are supposed to be founded in the truth, but it’s important to understand that all were written and directed by someone with a perspective and a motive. As we’ve all learned through social media and the emergence of biased “news” organizations, what’s presented as truth can be far from it. No matter what your interest is, there’s an entire genre of documentaries about it: art, business, sports, travel, food, fashion, religion, military, health and aging. And there are an ever-increasing number of places to view them: Netflix, Amazon, HBO, ESPN, PBS, HULU, YouTube, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and many others. My taste in documentaries is quite eclectic. If it’s well made, I can find myself totally absorbed in a film about almost anything. That said, here are a few that I’ve watched and enjoyed lately:
“Icarus” Bryan Fogel, the film’s director, who is an amateur bike racer, planned to investigate the use of performance-enhancing drugs by injecting himself and then trying to evade detection. As Fogel was shooting, his consulting expert, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, was identified as the mastermind behind Russia’s elaborate state-sponsored doping program at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. Recognizing a story more compelling and sinister than the one he was shooting, Fogel wisely pivoted and began getting first-hand details about the biggest athletic scandal in sports history. The result is a tense, fascinating and stranger-than-fiction, Oscar-winning film.
“Get Me Roger Stone” Whether you like where we are politically or not, if you want to know how we got here, “Get Me Roger Stone” will provide insight. The film is a riveting and disturbing look at the self-described “Dirty Trickster” of American politics. Stone ran smear campaigns for Richard Nixon in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he and his business partner, Paul Manafort, practically invented big-money lobbying and corporate influence, peddling access to President Ronald Reagan. Stone proudly takes credit for all but creating negative advertising, mud slinging and the use of misinformation in political campaigns. It was Stone who first suggested Donald Trump run for president and ignited his obsession with the “birther” issue. Last year, Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s presidential campaign. Stone was set to begin a 40-month prison term when his sentence was commuted by President Trump. 22
GROWING BOLDER / MARCH 21
