By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was a get things done week, so my background noise of choice was some rather quality Max documentaries.
212: Great Photo, Lovely Life
This devastating documentary delves deeply into the fractured family history of filmmaker and photographer Amanda Mustard. Her grandfather is a prolific and unrepentant child molester who has managed to escape serious consequences for his entire life, and as she and the other women in her family (and others outside it that he violated) try to make him do so, they pressures that build up may be explosive to their own relationships than to him, the bastard. Harrowing but raw and true. Two Beers.
213: Lost Women of Highway 20
This Max true crime documentary is about a series of murders that occurred along a remote stretch of Highway 20 in Oregon, in an area so sparsely populated that the suspects aren’t all that hard to narrow down, really. So why did it take so long and multiple murders for justice to finally be found? Yes, this is an unfortunately and sadly familiar story, but one that at least has a denouement. Three Beers.
214: The Truth vs. Alex Jones
I’m about to go on an absolute run of Max documentaries here- they’ve been churning out some good ones even despite the obfuscating dross of the Discovery merger. Anyway, this one is about the total dismantlement of Alex Jones in the courtroom over his blatant and repeated profit-driven (apparently political conspiracists are gullible as fuck when it comes to dodgy supplements) lies about the Sandy Hook child massacre. It turns out that the actual families and real authorities like judges have no patience for bloviating and callous disregard for their and their children’s lives. Here’s hoping the the man is finally forced to pay up like the deadbeat he is. Two Beers.
215: Let us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals
This doc profiles a group of brave women who stood up to reveal the abuses they and the women of the blatantly cultlike Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Church have suffered at the hands of the men who rule them like petty Greek gods (complete with their aberrant sexual appetites). This will make your blood boil, but thanks to the refusal of these brave women to step down, many of their rapists and abusers are finally starting to face justice. Two Beers.
216: Chowchilla
HBO again, and this one goes a bit further back in time to document the stunning Chowchilla, CA kidnapping of an entire bus of schoolchildren by masked and armed men, who proceeded to literally bury them in a chamber underground. I won’t tell you what happened next, except to say that this film does a great job of documenting the years-long, even to this day, after-effects of this traumatic experience on the children, whose experience has proven, the hard way, the necessity of mental health assistance for children who have survived awful events like this. Three Beers.
217: They Called Him Mostly Harmless
When a hiker’s emaciated body is found in the Everglades, a group of internet sleuths spends two years trying to find out who he was and how he ended up dead in such mysterious circumstances. This documentary will take you for a ride, revealing the details of this mystery (and its many false starts and dead ends) in chronological order. While not everyone here is objectively a good person, this makes the case that every person’s story is more complex than the worst (or best) things that they did. Two Beers.
218: Black and Missing
A last HBO documentary entry, this one assays the efforts of the Black and Missing Foundation to do the job Police and Media so often neglect to do with the same urgency as missing White people, particularly women, when they even bother to at all. This is hard, at times thankless work, but not without hope- they’ve found women and children who all but the families likely thought lost forever. Difficult, particularly for what it says about our society, but galvanizing. Two Beers.
