Re: movies
Sigh.
I just finished "Grizzly Man."
I remember reading about the subject of the film, Timothy Treadwell, a year or two ago right after he died. What I had recalled reading was that this was some guy who went out to live among wild bears in Alaska for long periods of time, and eventually ended up getting eaten by one ... to no one's surprise.
What we get in this documentary is some rather extreme videotaped confirmation that this fellow was in fact severly disturbed and suffering from sundry emotional and psychological issues. The bad part is that the documentary focuses almost exclusively on these problems, to the exclusion of what could be more interesting material. Far too much time is spent on interviews with friends and relatives, whose commentary always seemed to boil down to "yes, he was out of his mind."
We also see lots of video he took of himself: talking to the camera, and often doing multiple takes for what he must have envisioned as being a future movie. But what is glaringly absent from this film is any substantial amount of the actual wildlife footage itself, of which he apparently took hundreds of hours of footage during the course of five years. That seems like a bit of a waste to me -- because from the clips that are shown, it's obvious that he captured some extraordinarily unique and breathtaking footage. I was really hoping to see more of it, but was only to be disappointed. Unfortunately, we get to see comparatively little of his amazing footage, and mostly are stuck learning about Tim's mental state and motivations.
Questions that come to mind after watching this film: where do we draw the line between that inner need for transcendental experience, and our need for a stable reality? Jim Morrison comes to mind as a similar case; one who pushed the boundaries of ordinary reality so far that they broke. He openly was seeking death, as songs like "The End" make clear. Timothy Treadwell, too, held a tremendous amount of pain within him that he was seeking to escape. James Arthur, the mushroom shaman, talked about how the Amanita experience was one of "death and rebirth." The common denominator always seems to be that death is the sole condition on which humans become able to commune with the Divine.
For me, I think I'll give March of the Penguins a watch next. I'm not a big fan of wildlife documentaries, but after "Grizzly" I'm hoping to see some good footage that's free of psychotic humans. 
And it can watched with children, if you do have children in the home.
So happy to see that my first recommendation of Grizzly Man was redeemed by my second recommendation of March of the Penguins. 
