NO END IN SIGHT

9/11 happened five days before my nineteenth birthday. I was sitting on a couch in my dorm room drinking a protein shake when I turned on the TV to what I thought was an archived news story about the World Trade Center bombing in the 90’s. That was the day that I started to pay attention to the rest of the world. I remember country names like Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq from my childhood but I was far too consumed with video games and sports to ever really pay attention to something that would surely never affect my life in the small town where I grew up.

So as I watched the events unfold on that tragic day, I didn’t realize that I was being told what to think, how to feel, and more importantly the manner in how I should react to this threatening move against America. Up until that point I was completely oblivious to the way we operated around the world. Everything I was hearing out of the President’s mouth seemed to make sense. Everything that the newspapers were printing I left unchecked because I was content in knowing who attacked us and what we were planning on doing to ensure this never happened again. It was a story without holes that I left alone for almost an entire decade before out of sheer boredom I ran across a documentary titled “No End in Sight”.

At first I thought what any unquestioning Republican would think. A bunch of conspiracy theory hippies decided to smoke a bowl and make a movie slamming Bush like every other ungrateful un-American asshole that was pissed off about Gore losing the election. Let’s throw a bunch of graphic and shocking still shots into a montage, line up a demonic sounding score, and narrate a bunch of uneducated opinions over the score illustrating how evil the Bush/Cheney Empire was in their attempt to take over the world. Just writing this paragraph has me shaking my head in disbelief at my own ignorance.

The 9/11 events are a very slippery slope to examine or question and I’m not sure I’ll ever address what I believe happened on that day in this blog simply because I’d just be shoveling shitloads of hearsay at you which I promised I would try to avoid. That being said, the reason I eventually wanted to take a closer look at 9/11 is because of this film and believe me, there are few of 9/11 documentaries out there that I will recommend.

“No End in Sight” is directed by Charles Ferguson who only has one other film on this resume (Inside Job). The value of the doc really lies in the talking heads or lack thereof. Ferguson has tried to compile the most comprehensive list of first hand experts who were actually there during the initial invasion and just gets out of their way to let them tell the story. I won’t go into any details but I think if you ever have any question as to what in the world happened over there, it would be a smart move to pick this movie up. Being my first recommendation I hope this will help gain me some street cred for the rest of the films I have in store. Enjoy!

CLICK FOR THE REASONING BEHIND DOC OF THE DAY

DOCUMENTARIES ARE THE NEW INDEPENDENT NEWS

I’ve been a movie buff as long as I can remember but for some reason I’ve always shied away from documentaries. I think the main reason is that movies have always been my escape and docs always seem to remind me of the world I already lived in. For the most part I had always associated the non-fictional films with depressing topics like dying baby seals or mass genocide in a country I couldn’t pronounce. As I grew older I began to look at this art form in a different light.

I can imagine it’s a debate that can’t be won, but I would argue that the most valuable thing on this entire planet aside from time has to be information. If you don’t believe me then look at the manner in which over six billion people on this planet receive their daily information. The media. Love it or hate it you have to stand in amazement in the way that these entities deliver hundreds if not thousands of stories on a daily basis all over the world. Outlets take turns leading the stories into the mainstream and then scratch and claw with each other to add another insignificant detail here and there until the story dies.

It would seem that agendas are set from high up and then the writers get to fill in the gaps as the story unfolds. Needless to say if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that variety and risk taking don’t seem to be as rewarding as staying ahead of the other outlets and remaining inside the lines. I think some of the news that is reported contains some valuable information but in the last year or so things have become so vanilla and controlled that I began a quest for as much raw information as possible.

So in the past year I embarked on a journey to watch as many documentaries as possible. Now I’ll be the first one to admit that not only do documentaries have agendas, but that is the entire purpose for their existence. Some are fascinating. Some are insane. Some are hilarious. Some are heartbreaking. Some are so shocking that you have to pause the movie and start fact finding to try and disprove what you just heard. The amazing thing that I found is that a lot of information that I was hearing and checking was in fact true.

So my question? Why the hell have these topics never found their way into the mainstream media where they could have reached billions of people? I’ll leave that question for you but I eventually drew a very simple conclusion for myself that some of these documentarians were the People’s news reporters trying to pull the veil back on…well…whatever they thought was missing in the media.

So hundreds of films later and I’d like to pay it forward by playing a little game called Doc of the Day. I’m not naive enough to think that every single fact that are in these films are 100% accurate or completely in context, but I can tell you that I’ve found this platform to be a great jumping off point in the quest for information. Continue to question everything you see and hear including the shit that I throw at you. Fact check everything you find and I can guarantee you that at the end of the day you’ll have more answers than you did when it began.