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THE BIG ONE (1998). The "forgotten" film on Michael Moore's resume, this follows the intrepid moviemaker as he travels across the country promoting his best-selling book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American. By showcasing his guerilla tactics on the road while also interspersing footage from some of his speaking engagements, the movie becomes a hilarious (if not exactly fluid) hodgepodge of inspired sequences: Moore telling a Raleigh audience that he's determined to "put Jesse Helms behind bars"; Moore showing the checks he had mailed to various politicians to see if they'd cash them (labeled "Abortionists for Buchanan" and "Pedophiles for Perot" -- and, yes, they did cash them); and, finally, an unbelievable meeting with Nike CEO Phil Knight in which the mogul states that the reason his company employs impoverished teenage girls in Indonesia is because "Americans don't like making shoes" (after Moore offers evidence to the contrary, Knight adds, "Unemployed people will say anything to get work"). And Moore doesn't stop there: TWA, Steve Forbes and Borders Books & Music are some of the other targets whose reputations get downsized by his exposure of their corporate heartlessness.
MR. DEATH: THE RISE AND FALL OF FRED A. LEUCHTER, JR. (1999). Errol Morris finally won his Oscar this year for The Fog of War, but he's been making worthy nonfiction films for about two decades. Here, he comes up with a Holocaust piece unlike any I've ever seen -- one that focuses on a pitiful man who's unable to comprehend the magnitude of one of the most atrocious events in history. In 1988, Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel, on trial for attempting to incite racial violence with his books Did Six Million Really Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why, asked Leuchter, a squirrelly inventor known for his "humane" devices of execution, to travel to Auschwitz, illegally take samples from the prison walls, and determine if the facilities were indeed used as gas chambers. After concluding that no Jews were gassed at the camp, Leuchter became a popular speaker on the Holocaust-denial circuit but, not surprisingly, found every other aspect of his life destroyed. Morris leaves it up to the viewer to determine whether Leuchter is a heinous anti-Semite or merely a clueless goober -- as a friend opined, this movie isn't about the banality of evil as much as the banality of idiocy. Either way, it's chilling to watch Leuchter casually chip away at the Auschwitz walls, never once letting the horrors of the war seep into his stone-cold soul.
JANE GOODALL'S WILD CHIMPANZEES (2002). Although originally shot for large-format theaters, this worthy tribute to a great humanitarian loses none of its appeal on DVD. Shot primarily in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, the film opens with 40-year-old footage of the young Jane Goodall and her first experiences with chimpanzees. From there, it brings us to the present, with the still active, still beautiful Goodall (68 at the time of filming) introducing us to her swinging friends, all of whom have names because Goodall initially didn't realize that the scientific community preferred to number its study subjects. We learn that humans and chimps share about 98 percent of the same DNA; we watch as the kinder chimps snuggle with Goodall while the more rambunctious ones throw rocks at her; and we nod approvingly at this remarkable woman's complete adoration of her animal pals, displayed not only through her up-close-and-personal interactions but also through her extensive touring around the world, speaking passionately about the need for wildlife preservation.
TUPAC: RESURRECTION (2003). After just a few minutes into the film, it's clear to even those with no interest in astrology that Tupac Shakur was a Gemini, a fact that the late rapper himself confirms in interview footage shown midway through this incisive documentary. On one hand, here was a kid who took dance during his school years, who listed Don McLean, Lorraine Hansbury and William Shakespeare as influences, and who displayed enormous sensitivity in the film Poetic Justice. Yet here was also a social misfit who often submerged his finer qualities to foster a harsher persona, who exhibited streaks of misogyny on more than one occasion, and who lived a violent lifestyle even as he spoke about achieving goals through peaceful means. Clearly, Tupac never quite fit the stereotypical image of the gangbanging thug, and the strength of this documentary -- packed with interviews, home movie footage, and entries from Tupac's journals -- is that it never flinches in showing us why he made the choices he felt he had to make, even though they ended up costing him his life. For another provocative documentary on the man, rent Biggie & Tupac, which centers exclusively on the blood feuds between the East Coast and West Coast rappers.
