The very best advice I will give this year is: run, don't walk to your video store (or Netflix) and rent Mad Hot Ballroom a feel good documentary about a New York City public school ball room dancing program and competition. This is a delightful film with a great cast of real-life characters in the multi-cultural milieu that is New York city. I guarantee you'll smile, cheer and weep all in the same hour. I know I did. And, the music is great too !
After reading the year-end “Best Of” lists that cited Lost, the ABC TV series about plane crash survivors among the year's top TV programs I ordered the entire first series (2004) from Netflix.
I am so intolerant of episodic TV because of the annoying commercials except for news I almost only watch TV programs available on DVD. I watch when I want to watch, as many or as few episodes as I want at any given time.
During 2005 I watched all of OZ, all available DVDs of The Wire and the first season of UPN's Veronica Mars. In each case, reading the recommendation of others sent me to explore these TV dramas which I would otherwise have missed.
I believe Lost deserves it's top-ten designation. The series is plot and incident driven with superb character development that includes a lot of backstory about the lives of the stranded passengers on a mysterious island.
I'm not a fan of reality shows so I was skeptical at first. But this is definitely not a reality show—there's a lot of incongruous plot involving polar bears, unseen whispering voices and unexplained creepy phenomena none of which appeals to me, but admittedly contributes to the grip the storyline has between segments and episodes. I was never bored.
Lost is not a 'procedural” drama, like West Wing or CSI, in which the plot line is finished, the mystery or conflict resolved by the end of the hour. With those shows one can watch any episode, anytime and be satisfied with a self-contained dramatic story.
Nor is Lost a reality show, although it owes much of it's production design to the Survivor model. I have only once watched Survivor and have no interest in bug-eating, back-stabbing hard bodies playing outward bound games.
With Lost, both action oriented plot along with interweaving backstories about the characters build over many episodes a captivating mystery about interesting people in constant danger while struggling with their past and uncertain future.
The Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a documentary film I've been waiting for over a year to see. It's just come out on DVD and I am pleased to discover it was worth the wait.
This is the kind of documentary that drove me to become a filmmaker--it's story and images make up the kind of film I admire and like to make.
The story is about Mark Bittner an intelligent, wise and articulate hippie type living in a hill side apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. He says he has not worked in 30 years, lived on the street for 15 of them only recently began to devoted his life to getting to know 45 wild parrots living outside his apartment.
Without pinning down the origin of the cherry-crowned conures, the filmmakers present several theories of the urban legend genre all of which put forth the premise that wild birds somehow, somewhere, someplace escaped captivity and found San Francisco hospitable and so flourished. By the time the DVD was released an estimated 180 birds make up the flock.
One of the delights of most DVDs are the special features and in the case of The Birds of Telegraph Hill I found the deleted scenes and Mark's Home Movie, which runs 28-minutes on it's own, especially enjoyable. Mark has written a book with the same title. I'm looking forward to reading it too. 
This is by far the best documentary I've seen in a long time.
It follows a group of mostly young men as they train and compete at wheelchair rugby in national and olympic competitions.
In interviews on TV conducted at the release of the film --collected in the special features second of the DVD--they offer personal insights about being quadriplegics, the circumstances surrounding their individual cases and how important in their lives the game has been.
They might have us believe that the film is a sports documentary and ought to be judged on that criteria alone. They're wrong. The least interesting thing about the film is the game.
The most interesting and gratifying things about the film are about acceptance, recovery, family, friendship and sex.
I was pleased to read today that the HBO film Sometime in April was chosen as one of the year's best by one of the year-end "best of" lists.
Having seen Hotel Rwanda I was not ready for another epic about the terrible genocide there, but I'm glad I noticed the best of mention and picked up the DVD at my local video store. It was a superb film, gripping, disturbing and enraging.
How indifferent everyone was when this holocaust was happening. How smug and self-serving U.S. bureaucrats were, how ineffective was the UN and how stupid racist humans can be.
BTW, I thought the acting was outstanding.
Born Into Brothels is the 2004 Academy
Award feature documentary about a group of children born in into
Calcutta sex worker families.
Filmmaker and photographer Zana Briski lived and worked in the red light district and began teaching photography to the children portrayed in this powerfully moving film.
Poverty and hopelessness are two main characters in this picture, but its vibrant colors and beautiful faces, especially those of the children, captured on so many of this film's cameras leaves a redeeming patina if not an outright shining glow to an otherwise morbid and depressing subject. The smiles, grins, laughs and joy-filled faces of these children bely the doomed future they inevitably face.
They are doomed because of a gross
prejudice and bureaucratic indifference. Children of “criminals”,
as sex workers in India, are considered, are seldom accepted at
private schools—their only hope to step out of the
multi-generational brothels business, or, as is painfully detailed
in the film, unlikely even to be given a passport to travel abroad.
< Avijit, an 11-year-old exceptionally talented boy was 'discovered' by a New York photo rep following a gallery show and sale at Sotheby's in New York. He was invited to travel to Holland along with 13 other young photographers from around the world. Getting the boy a passport was a bureaucratic nightmare masterfully constructed in the film by Briski and co-director Ross Kaufman
During the making of the film Avijit's prostitute mother, herself the daughter of a prostitute, was murdered by her pimp—set afire in her kitchen. An 'accident' so common there would be no police investigation, the victim being 'criminal', and of no consequence. Except, as is dramatically shown on film, to Avijit, who for a time stopped going to school, stopped showing up for photography class and withdrew from his friends.
Avijit did finally get a passport and flew to icy Amsterdam to attend the World Press Photo exhibition, representing India and serving as a judge for the children's exhibit. Back in Calcutta, Avijit was later accepted into a boys school where he may be one of very few to break the cycle. Most of the other children who were able, by the film's close, to get into boarding schools have since left
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