documentaries

Had a few documentaries queued up in netflix, which arrived this weekend:

• The Weather Underground – good and fairly even-handed coverage of the radical left in the Vietnam war era. A good testament to the extent to which people can be completely retarded.
• Revolution OS – a documentary covering the emergence of the open-source movement. More entertaining than I expected, really, mostly due to the charming eccentricity of the interviewees. Some of the editing was a little cheezy – lots of beep-boop “digital” sound effects cut in with fast-motion shots of highway driving (for some reason). Some of the narration was a little frenetic – for example, a woman reading a letter from Bill Gates was obviously trying a little too hard to make him sound like a nutjob. It was also not very even-handed, basically presenting these guys and the companies they founded around OSS as visionary geniuses and then tacking on a tiny footnote at the very end (oh, by the way VA Linux’s stock plummeted and it imploded.) Otherwise entertaining and worth watching.