Further incentive to track down Documentary Now!; John Slattery is in Episode 2 playing a guy making a 'Nanook of the North' doc. back in the 1920s...
BTW, episodes of Documentary Now! are quite hard to get hold of down under, but appear to be widely available in the US, e.g., they're on Youtube in the US for $1.99 a pop, are also on the Google Play store (presumably for the same deal), and probably elsewhere too (maybe from IFC's own website). It might be worth exploring Hulu, Netflix, and the like wherever you are - if it's available at one of these places and you've been thinking about maybe getting a general subscription then this might be thing that tips the balance in some service's favor. At any rate, if you decide to go the youtube route, the first ep., i.e., the one with the Psycho twist is called 'Sandy Passage'.
Update: Checking a bit more, Doc. Now! is streaming (for free) on a whole range of sites that have sprung up in the last year or two that people mainly access through apps on their smart-phones and then 'throw' the image to their TV screens via a Chromecast key or the like. I don't do any of that tech but, checking now, those sites *do* work fine directly over the web too (it's funny, I do have a Netflix subscription but I tend to forget that it too works fine over the web on my laptop). Googling with intent *will* get you quasi-legal success if you persist! That said, at least if you are in the US (or maybe Canada too), there are good, relatively cheap, fully legal options, and the show's definitely worth a minor splurge like that.
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swanstep (2616)
6 years ago
Having completed the first (7 episode) Season of Documentary Now!, I think it's fair to say that the series is consistently very good, but that the first four eps.:
Sandy Passage w/ its Psycho Twist (parodying 'Grey Gardens')
Kunuk Uncovered (parodying fascination with possibly staged early docs like 'Nanook of the North')
Dronez (parodying Vice-style, hipster-lifestyle, conflict-zone reporting)
The Eye Doesn't Lie (parodying Errol Morris's advocacy docs generally and The Thin Blue Line specifically)
are bona fide classics (w. the truly brilliant Sandy Passage still my favorite). You can't think about their parodic targets in the same way after them!
The season ended with a music-themed 2-parter that some people love (it's kind of half way between A Mighty Wind, Almost Famous, and Spinal Tap), and indeed I suppose that there is some chance it could end up expanded into a feature. I thought it was just pretty good.
Anyhow, 4/7 classic and 2/7 not-classic-but-good-enough-to-be-a-feature (according to many) is an excellent strike-rate. I look forward to checking out the Second and (forthcoming) Third seasons. Recommended.
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