Documentary-athon

With Dara out of town last week, I Netflixed three documentaries.

• Man on Wire. The life story of tightrope walker Philippe Petit, leading up to his infamous walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. It was fascinating to track his obsession with the whole thing and the mechanics of how he and his cohorts managed to pull it off. Highly recommended.


• The Corporation. Tracks a bit of the history of corporations, but mostly their growing influence over our lives. This documentary reminded me of a book I read, When Corporations Rule the World. I have my own opinions about the role of corporations in the world today. I'm sympathetic to a lot of the points in this left-leaning documentary, but I found the lame attempts to appear balanced to be distracting and probably would have preferred a straight-up, honest hatchet job.


• Grizzly Man. A Werner Herzog documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers living with grizzly bears in Alaska, but ended up as a pre-hibernation snack for one in the end. While the story was interesting, and there was great footage of grizzlies, Treadwell was just too much of a flake for me to relate to. Anthropomorphizing doesn't even begin to describe it. A good documentary, though, and I imagine different people will have quite different reactions to Treadwell, from noble to flake to hopelessly innocent.