Docs are still rockin'

I’m still pushing documentaries and have some more to recommend, first off several from PBS, which are available on Netflix, not just on DVD but as a free download for subscribers, and also on PBS.org. Botany of Desire recapitulates Michael Pollan’s great book of the same name, in a coherent and visually impressive manner, devoting a half-hour each to the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato, as each plant appeals to human desires – for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control – to insure its co-evolutionary survival. Pollan’s case for diversity is judicious and entertaining, filled with “gee, I didn’t know that” facts and striking images.

I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.

Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.

HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.

But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.

Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.