Of all things Geek. I am…
Not all documentaries are created equal. Some are out to prove a point, others hope to make you think, and even more are out to entertain, uncover, or educate. Music documentaries do a lot of those things, except they obviously tend to have music.
In having said music, the talking heads are commonly musicians or fans, and even the most serious music documentary has some light moments of laughter.
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Winter: A Novel of a Berlin Family by Len Deighton is a familial masterpiece. Starting with Harald Winter and focusing on his two sons, Peter and Paul Winter, this novel follows the family’s journey as their spouses and friends are all intertwined in chaotic and random events as history unfolds with World War I and World War II.
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Every major city in the world has a talented writer. Every city in the world has a travel guide of some sort, but what City of Glass: Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver does is marry the talented writer with the travel guide glued together with a passion for one’s own hometown, to create not just a travel guide, but a glimpse into local life.
I read the 2006 Revised Edition, but originally published in 2000, this book is Vancouver’s ABCs, a local tourism perspective, the likes of which you’d need to find a very good local blogger to get from anywhere else.
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Garden State examines the cloud of one’s self. There are moments of varying length where we spend a ton of time in our own world; meanwhile, to the world at large, we’re just going through the motions.
This film is about that, and how one person, at one time, pulls himself out of that cloud.
It’s also very much an art film. The first few minutes establish that well, and Zach Braff’s vision of the film as a piece of art is beautiful.
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The story of Scooter, and its titular protagonist, Scooter Riley, is an authentic piece of fiction about parts of New York City from 1964 to 1978, using baseball as a measuring stick as many fans do.
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