Prime Video‘s library of deeply weird and deliciously weird documentaries and documentaries is a gift that lets you jump from true crime to cryptics, broad sports docs and super specific subcultures.
This beautiful spring weekend (March 27-29) and beyond, I’m back out of Prime’s rabbit hole with a basketball doctor, a Mulder and Scully-worthy mystery in small-town West Virginia, and Oscar-nominated intelligence on drug cartels operating in mid-US-Mexi-01.
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Meal ticket
The origin story of the iconic McDonald’s All-American Games
With next week’s McDonald’s All-American Games high school basketball showcase, this new documentary on Prime Video arrives just in time. Unfortunately, it has a name Meal ticket is a deep and magnificently crafted 95-minute nostalgia trip into the origins of what became the launching pad for the world’s best basketball players.
Directed by first-time Carlton Gerard Sabbs and Corey Colvin and produced by Jay Z’s Roc Nation, Meal ticket It uses interviews and never-before-seen archival footage dating back to its inception in 1977 to trace the history of the event, a proving ground for the NBA and WNBA and featuring everyone from Jordan and LeBron to Kobe, Shaq and Candace Parker. The long-running games feature top boys and girls high school seniors who go head-to-head in two games and also compete in a fun skills competition the night before. The Doctor is an impressive trip down memory lane where greats like Shaquille O’Neal, A’ja Wilson and Grant Hill share what this passing game has meant to them in their careers.
If you are a fan of basketball, like it Ring dreams or last dance, Meal ticket It will be a satisfying watch with some great footage of some of the icons of the sport when they were young rising stars.
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Point Pleasant Mothman
Small town legend or something very strange?
Everyone has a friend or two who has a tale of something inexplicable they once saw—a strange floating fog figure in a window or a light flying across the sky like a bullet. Point Pleasant Mothman is an incredible story of one of these tales, but this story was shared by dozens of people over a year and it has become firmly established in fairy tales. information about a small West Virginia town.
For 13 months between 1966 and 1967, residents of Point Pleasant reported sightings of a winged, devil-like creature with piercing red eyes on the roads and in other areas of the state – they called it the Moth. The sightings continued until the tragic collapse of Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge, which killed 46 people and changed the city’s identity forever. The moth was never seen again.
What was that? Was it some kind of supernatural warning of impending doom? Point Pleasant Mothman Using archival footage, interviews with living residents who claim to have seen the object, and a digitally animated reconstruction of the chronology, it explores the myth to craft a strange but compelling document unlike many watches you’re likely to see.
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Cartel Land
Vigilantes, cartels and the dangerous gray zone
Cartel Land A tense and powerful documentary from 2015 that explores the deadly and complex Mexican drug war along the US/Mexico border. Filmed between 2013 and 2014, director/cinematographer Matthew Heineman (City of ghosts), along with his crew, seemingly dodged bullets and put themselves in direct danger as they were stationed on both sides of the border with two vigilante groups taking the law into their own hands against the Knights Templar cartel.
Heineman first spent about five months in Arizona patrolling the border for cartel members with militia leader Tim “Nailer” Foley. He then spent another nine months in Michoacan, on the Mexican border, as José Manuel Mireles and his coalition of citizens, the Autodefensas, took up arms and began retaking Templar-occupied cities as the corrupt government failed to do so.
Speaking as a war correspondent, Cartel Land even from his point of view, approaching the jungle hideouts of cartel meth makers, he presents a frontal view of this complex situation, which does not leave alone moral gray areas.
Prepared by the executive Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Cartel Land is a great watch, deserving of a Best Documentary Oscar nod and a 90% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
If your weekend viewing list needs a shake-up, these Prime Video picks offer stories stranger, messier, and more compelling than fiction. Be prepared to have fun and maybe a little anxiety.
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- Synchronous streams
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Prime Video has a huge amount of content to watch. Other Amazon benefits are also a bonus.
