⁣Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock features as the guinea pig in this film about the fast food industry. Inspired by America’s obesity epidemic, he goes on a diet of McDonald’s three times a day for thirty days straight in order to examine the effects of fast food consumption on the body and mind. The effects of the trial are harrowing: His body mass increases by 13%, his cholesterol levels skyrocket, fat accumulates in his liver, and he experiences mood swings and loss of libido. Super Size Me will completely change the way you think about eating and living.

Super Size Me accomplishes the feat of being both entertaining and horrifying. It investigates how the fast food culture in American schools, corporations and politics is driving nationwide obesity. In between meals, Spurlock drives across the country and interviews a host of health and nutrition experts, lawyers, school workers, and a surprisingly trim man who has eaten over 19,000 Big Macs yet maintains a healthy cholesterol level. We also meet an industry lobbyist who states that consumers need to be educated about nutrition and perplexingly proclaims that “we’re part of the problem and part of the solution”.

The film investigates the industry’s political lobbying and advertising campaigns. We learn about some of the disturbing strategies McDonald’s uses to acquire customers. It is particularly effective at getting children hooked at an early age through mediums they love, such as birthday parties, toys, clowns and playgrounds. In certain areas, the McDonald’s playground is the only one the community has. In one of the most shocking scenes of Super Size Me, Spurlock shows pictures of Jesus, George Washington and Ronald McDonald to a group of first graders, and Ronald is the only one that all of them can identify.

Spurlock is a likeable host, both witty and engaging. Despite his criticism of the fast food industry, he does not place the blame solely on corporations, and at one point asks the rhetorical question of where personal responsibility stops and corporate responsibility begins. Towards the end of the experiment, he is a changed man. The exuberant and healthy host we meet at the beginning of the film has transformed into a puffy, weary and depleted man. He has experienced first-hand the damaging effect of junk food on the nation. All in all, Super Size Me is a fascinating and informative insight into the fast food industry and its link to the American obesity epidemic.

⁣Three Identical Strangers: the bizarre tale of triplets separated at birth
“Ideas are my bread and butter,” says film-maker Tim Wardle. “But it’s hard to find ideas that make you want to get out of bed at 3am and go film somewhere.”


That, however, was not the case when a producer at Raw, the London-based production company where Wardle works, brought to his attention the story of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, a set of identical triplets who knew nothing of one another until they were reunited by happenstance at age 19. That alone would make for a compelling documentary, but their story doesn’t end there.


Bobby, Eddy and David are the subjects of Wardle’s new film Three Identical Strangers, an extraordinary documentary that starts as a feelgood human interest story and, by the end, has you questioning the nature of existence. As far as documentary subjects go, this one is nonpareil, a fact that was heavy on Wardle’s mind as he set out to tell the brothers’ story on film. “There’s huge pressure not to fuck up the story,” he admits. “I wasn’t worried about money or anything like that. I was just like, ‘I can’t blow this.’”


Three Identical Strangers begins in 1980, as a 19-year-old Bobby Shafran attends his first day of university only to find unfamiliar classmates greeting him as Eddy. While it’s only the first in a series of fortuitous revelations, most of which are better seen than read about here, Wardle is smart to tell the first half of the documentary through narration and recreated scenes, a tactic that allows the viewer to get a sense of how uncanny it must be to move into your dorm room and find you’re already an on-campus celebrity. Eventually, Bobby and Eddy meet and are contacted by David, whose adoptive mother noticed a pair of twins in the newspaper who looked exactly like her son, down to their shared pudgy hands.


Those alive in the early 80s might remember what followed, a period of pre-internet virality that took the triplets from the Phil Donahue Show to a cameo alongside Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. As they made the rounds, audiences lapped up the brothers’ likeness: they finished each other’s sentences, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, even had the same taste in women. When one brother crossed his legs, the others followed. So, in the ensuing decade, they made good on the frenzy by opening a steakhouse in Soho, New York, called Triplets, which thrived until things between them went sour.


To Wardle, the honeymoon period served as wish-fulfillment for the brothers and the media. “There’s been an obsession with identicals going back to Romulus and Remus,” he says. “And the siblings wanted to believe that they were similar, too. It’s that thing where you fall in love with someone for the first time, you try and find everything you have in common. ‘Oh my God, we like the same music!’ But you sort of tone down the differences.”


The brothers, as they discovered on account of their own detective skills, were separated by a ritzy New York City adoption agency called Louise Wise Services, which declined to tell their adoptive parents they were a set of three. It’s at this juncture that the documentary turns – tonally, structurally, thematically – and embraces a very au courant style of leather-shoe reporting in Wardle’s efforts to uncover the bizarre and nefarious reasons for the brothers’ 19-year estrangement. But convincing producers he’d get there wasn’t easy.


“They kept saying, ‘What’s the third act? What’s the third act?’ And I’m like, it’s a documentary, you don’t always know!” recalls Wardle, who was accustomed to inconclusive, even plotless projects after making a documentary about prisoners serving life-sentences. Too many documentaries, he believes, explore “weighty”, ethically fraught issues without a human element to provide connective tissue. But since he had that in the first act, Wardle was confident he’d end up with a finished product whether or not his own sleuthing yielded results.


The question at the center of Three Identical Strangers essentially concerns nature versus nurture, which led Wardle to California, where he interviewed Natasha Josefowitz, the 90-year-old research assistant who contributed to psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer’s study of siblings separated at birth.
For Wardle and Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who is featured in the film, the idea that nature is more determinative than nurture is an unsettling one, especially as articulated in Josefowitz’s frank, unsparing style.


“She would talk to me about how much of what I’ve done in my life was a function of biology and genes, how little agency I had, which was kind of mind-blowing,” says Wardle, who gives equal weight in the film to both theses while endorsing neither. “A lot of liberal ideology is based on the idea that nurture is really, really important. So when you start down the nature perspective you end up in quite a politically and scientifically dark place, a kind of eugenicist paradise where, ‘Why bother trying to help people?’ It’s all determined by biology anyway.”


Or is it? As Three Identical Strangers proceeds, you find yourself seduced by both prospects, the relative liberty afforded by nurture and the ice cold-comfort of nature. Mostly, though, it’s the brothers who keep the film grounded in reality, which turned out far different than it looked when they got their first taste of fame on the talkshow circuit.


When Wardle recently showed them the film, they were surprised to find he delivered as he’d promised. “I realized at that point how much they’d been disappointed and let down in their lives,” he says. “Documentaries are only as good as the contributors and what they give you. And they gave me pretty much everything.”

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2018/jun/27/miste

⁣Based on the book by environmentalist lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci is a two-part documentary directed by Kala Mandrake.

When the coronavirus outbreak happened, one face became known to the American public as the one standing for “the science.” That man was NIH Director Anthony Fauci and he continues to haunt the media. However, who is this man? Where did he come from? How has he worked at the NIH for so long? Kennedy explores Fauci’s hidden past, revealing corruption, conflicts of interest, and even a disregard for ethics.

One of the most illuminating parts of the documentary was how Fauci peddled ADZ as a treatment for the AIDs epidemic. Any dissenting voices to his official press release were mocked and disregarded. There is a similar pattern in regard to coronavirus. Fauci did not meet a camera he did not want to yell at and that could be his downfall.

Unlike the glowing propaganda film that Disney put out, this documentary was fearless in its pursuit of the truth behind what is going on behind the scenes with government regulators who are supposed to be protecting Americans when it comes to healthcare.

The tail end of it does sort of veer into a commercial for Ted Kennedy Jr.s organization, but it is his documentary, so I’ll let it slide. There were a few topics I do not agree with Kennedy on, but this issue of Fauci’s fraud overrides those issues.

With this in mind, I went into this skeptical but I came out wondering how the federal health “experts” get away with so much. Fauci has gotten it wrong so many times and somehow he is the highest-paid government official. It is one of the most bizarre things to happen, but it seems in politics, you can fail upwards.

The documentary is an impressive look at the evidence not to mention a feature from which Americans can learn a great deal.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://studiojakemedia.com/20....22/10/26/the-real-an

⁣The story of activist group Act Up and its struggle with authority in the early years of Aids makes for a compelling and often moving documentary

"Plague!" howls screenwriter/playwright Larry Kramer like some Old Testament prophet in one of the many arresting moments from this urgent, heartbreaking, and ultimately empowering account of how Aids activists took control of their own destiny in the late 1980s when the US government and health services failed to do so. Kramer is addressing an increasingly heated Act Up (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) meeting, silencing those who have fallen into factional bickering with a voice which conjures up rage, anger and defiance.

Kramer's outburst is extraordinary, captured in grainy footage along with 700 hours of archive material (TV interviews, news broadcasts, reportage), through which director David France sifts to put us right there in the middle of the emerging struggle. What's even more remarkable is just how effectively the disparate group Kramer calls to order manage to put aside their differences to become a dynamic and wide-ranging force for change, saving lives even as they look death in the face.

Like David Weissman and Bill Weber's equally powerful We Were Here, which movingly documented the response to the outbreak of Aids in San Francisco, How to Survive a Plague offers an enlightening portrait of community action in the face of appalling government negligence and barely concealed anti-gay prejudice. Footage of George Bush blithely advocating a "change of lifestyle" as the only cure for HIV sits alongside riotous film of Act Up members staging peaceful occupations that rattle the cages of both the government and the pharmaceutical industry.

In one gut-wrenching sequence, the ashes of lost loved ones are scattered on the lawns of the White House as baton-wielding policemen on horses attempt to prevent the protesters from making their stand (we think of Joe Hill's call to arms, "Don't mourn, organise!"). Yet even in the midst of such clashes, the authorities came to realise that, in the words of one federal official, "they know more than we do". Gradually, members of Act Up (who included scientists, chemists, and researchers) were accepted onto the boards of those struggling to oversee the crisis, their literate, informed and practical responses to floundering drug development becoming a key part of the search for a cure.

With its intimate footage of activists, several of whom fall by the wayside before the final credits, How to Survive a Plague is a compellingly watchable portrait of a battle fought under that most memorable rallying cry: "Silence = Death". Bravo.

... as 2023 gathers pace, we have a small favour to ask. A new year means new opportunities, and we're hoping this year gives rise to some much-needed stability and progress. Whatever happens, the Guardian will be there, providing clarity and fearless, independent reporting from around the world, 24/7.

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Unlike many others, we have no billionaire owner, meaning we can fearlessly chase the truth and report it with integrity. 2023 will be no different; we will work with trademark determination and passion to bring you journalism that’s always free from commercial or political interference. No one edits our editor or diverts our attention from what’s most important.

With your support, we’ll continue to keep Guardian journalism open and free for everyone to read. When access to information is made equal, greater numbers of people can understand global events and their impact on people and communities. Together, we can demand better from the powerful and fight for democracy.


REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2013/nov/10/how-t

⁣As long as you accept there’ll be no genuine analysis in “My Generation,” Michael Caine’s joy ride through his youth offers significant pleasures. There’s a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had in David Batty’s “My Generation,” a sloppy wet kiss to Michael Caine and British youth culture of the 1960s. Loaded with great footage from the era and accompanied by superbly cleaned-up music tracks from the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many others, this love letter-as-documentary offers 85 minutes of good old fun. What it doesn’t do is posit any genuine analysis or even make a head-nod to diversity.

But this is Caine’s narrative about the unapologetic working class taking over popular culture, and the writers as well as music mogul Simon Fuller, acting as top producer, have no interest in countering their star’s gleefully empowering chronicle of his youth. Voiceover interviews with such key players of the era as Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Twiggy and Mary Quant add to the overall feast, making the film an attractive offering for all platforms. Britain in the 1950s was dull, announces Caine, though doesn’t every generation say that about the era before their own gloriously self-satisfied arrival?

What’s undeniable is the momentous shift toward youth culture beginning in the 1960s, as well as the opening up of opportunities for white working-class creative types who no longer submitted to makeovers designed to smooth out their roughness. In one of the more telling anecdotes, Caine talks about auditioning for “Zulu,” his breakthrough role, and accurately suggests that had the director, Cy Endfield, been British instead of American, Caine’s working class London accent would have eliminated any hope of being cast in the role of an upper-class officer. That’s an undeniable fact.

Far more shaky is the suggestion that the working class in the 1960s was the first generation in Britain to thumb its collective nose at convention. On-the-street interviews from the era with stuffed shirts bemoaning the appearance of long-haired men in flowery blouses expose middle-class attitudes, but the filmmakers choose to ignore the fact that the upper class has always played with transgression in ways designed to shock the bourgeoisie. What made the 1960s different was that the working class was playing the same game, and emulating “our betters” was no longer an acceptable form of behavior.

Nor was emulating our elders: Freedom from convention was the hallmark of a social revolution that impacted everything from art, music and clothing to changing concepts of morality. Of course, every Englishman knows the class system remains the key determinant of opportunity, but in the art and entertainment world, coming from the wrong side of the tracks is actually now more desirable than a boarding school certificate, and that’s definitely due to the upheavals of the 1960s. Batty divides the film into three parts, roughly corresponding to the awakening, the flourishing and the decline of 1960s pop culture.

Alongside nods to expected historic markers like the Beatles performing at Liverpool’s Cavern Club are more unanticipated moments, such as Roger Daltry talking about the profound impact of seeing Elvis perform: “For the first time in my life, I saw someone who was free.” That’s about the only time in the film there’s a mention of transatlantic influences on the British scene. From there, the documentary plunges headlong into the intoxicating psychedelic playpen of Pop Art, Vidal Sassoon haircuts, and Mary Quant micro-miniskirts, reminding audiences (or teaching them for the first time) that in the 1960s, color and pattern were transgressive and hip, unlike today’s tediously conformist black monochromaticity.

Suddenly, thanks to the British Invasion, being young and British meant you were cool, stylish and glam, tuned into the best music, clothes and art movements. Models such as Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy set new standards for beauty, and groups like the Animals, the Kinks, the Stones and of course the Beatles set the tone, guiding a generation from the innocent charm of “Love Me Do” to the raucous hunger of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” By the end of the decade, hedonism took a darker turn.

The Vietnam War acted as a political coming of age, and the destructive nature of so much heavy drug use began to take its toll, symbolized by the death of Brian Jones and Faithfull’s near-fatal drug overdose, both in 1969. For Caine, “My Generation” is a chance to look back in nostalgic delight at his salad days, allowing him to gamely reminisce about his time as one of the “it” boys of London. He even gets to swan around in the original Aston Martin DB4 he drove in “The Italian Job.”
None of the others interviewed are seen on screen — whether that’s because the producers wanted to maintain the aura of 1960s youth, or it was the only way to get these people to talk, remains open for speculation. It’s also likely that writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais allowed themselves to be guided by Caine’s insistence on working-class culture, ignoring the fact that some of those included, most especially Faithfull, are from posh backgrounds. If you set aside analytical skills however, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the wealth of archival clips accompanied by fantastic music tracks that seem to have been remastered for the occasion (lord knows how much all the music rights must have cost).

Ben Hilton’s editing successfully crams in a great deal without a sense of whiplash. Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition), Sept. 4, 2017. (Also in London Film Festival – Journey.) Production: (Documentary — U.K.) An XIX Entertainment presentation, in association with IM Global, of a Raymi Films production, in association with Ingenious Media. (International sales: IM Global, Los Angeles.)

Producers: Simon Fuller, Michael Caine, Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly. Executive producer: James Clayton. Co-producer: Ben Hilton. CREW: Director: David Batty. Writers: Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais. Camera (color): Ben Hodgson. Editor: Ben Hilton. Music supervisor: Tarquin Gotch. Crew: With: Michael Caine Voices of David Bailey, Twiggy, Terry O’Neill, Roger Daltrey, Marianne Faithfull, Paul McCartney, Lulu, Joan Collins, Sandie Shaw, Penelope Tree, Dudley Edwards, Mary Quant, Mim Scala, David Putnam, Barbara Hulanicki.

⁣It’s a commonplace to hear people say movies changed their life, but with Owen Suskind that statement is meaningful in an unexpectedly profound way. His remarkable story is so unusual you would dismiss it out of hand if it were fiction, but the documentary “Life, Animated” demonstrates that it’s completely true.


Not just any films changed Suskind’s life, but rather the classic animated features from the Walt Disney Company. Films like “Dumbo,” “Bambi,” “Peter Pan,” “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.” You’ve probably watched them yourself. But Owen Suskind has not just watched them, he’s absorbed them so completely he’s practically lived them.
As directed by Roger Ross Williams (who won Sundance’s documentary director prize) and based on the bestselling book by Owen’s father, Ron Suskind, “Life, Animated” joins Owen’s life at a pivotal moment and shows us where he’s been and what his future looks like.
At 23, Owen Suskind is a cheerful and energetic young man who wears his autism lightly. He has a girlfriend, is just finishing school and is nervous and excited about living by himself for the first time in an assisted living facility on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.


Owen talks to himself when he’s anxious, but almost exclusively in the dialogue of Disney films. He has seen them so many times he’s memorized every word, and no wonder. They have proved to be a lifeline that has brought him back to the world and helped him make sense of it.
When we first meet Owen, it’s in a family home movie, an antic 2-year-old being read to by his father. Then, without warning, at age 3, this lively boy stopped talking entirely.


“His language processes broke down,” says his mother, Cornelia, who still tears up at the memory, while father Ron says it was as if his son “vanished,” adding “it was like looking for clues to a kidnapping.”
Doctors were initially baffled as well, eventually diagnosing “pervasive developmental disorder,” where the world and its noise become too intense.


One of the only things the Suskinds, including older brother Walt, could still do as a family was watch the Disney family movies Owen had always loved, and they did.


The specific circumstances and episodes of how Owen returned to speech are so remarkable they’re best left to be discovered in the film, but though he did return, it did not mean that things would always go smoothly for him, either as the child he was or the young adult he now is.


No matter what Owen is dealing with, starting with childhood bullying when he “walked the halls of fear” or more adult problems that make him wonder “why is life so full of unfair pain and tragedy,” he uses his Disney animation fascination to work through it.


As a child, for instance, he created an entire cartoon universe he called “The Land of the Lost Sidekicks” and cast himself as the protector of sidekicks against the evil Fuzzbutch. One of “Life, Animated’s” loveliest touches is a beautiful animated sequence, created by France’s Mac Guff Animation, that brings that world completely to life.
Better even than the animation, however, is the sense of the people involved that the film provides, especially of Owen, a remarkable young man who, as director Williams says, “has raw emotions - he doesn’t have filters.”
Williams, whose last feature-length documentary was the very different “God Loves Uganda,” an exposé of how evangelical fundamentalists demonized homosexuality, spent two years on this project, and the trust everyone involved placed in him allowed for an emotional honesty that is “Life, Animated’s” greatest strength.
By the time Owen says, “the future? I’m still searching for it,” we feel his life is in very good hands. His own


REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.latimes.com/paid-posts/?prx_t=qU4HAx95SAfYAQA&ntv_acpl=1081469&ntv_acsc=2&ntv_ot=2&ntv_gsscm=853*5;839*16;2008*8;842*6;&ntv_ui=e1f13dc5-f00b-45a6-ab12-cb9178ba0059&ntv_ht=FvEkZAA

⁣No comedian was ever funnier, no fighter ever faster than Muhammad Ali, who is caught at the top of his game in Leon Gast's valentine, "When We Were Kings."

The movie is built around the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. Though the Oscar-nominated documentary captures the fight and the fighters, it also explores Ali's role in reintroducing black Americans to their African culture.

Best of all, it resurrects Ali as bee, butterfly and maker of bons mots. Mind, mouth, muscles, all in accord, move a mile a minute as the 32-year-old prepares to wrest the heavyweight crown from the formidable, 26-year-old titleholder. Fit and fleet as Ali is, conventional wisdom has it that Ali's a dead man.

Ali, as Gast's film repeatedly and delightfully demonstrates, was hardly a conventional soul. He comes through as a maverick's maverick. And he's up against formidable competition in this film, including Don King. It was the ex-con with "the great uprush of hair" who managed to talk Mobutu Sese Seko, the Zairian dictator, into staging the fight. Persuaded that it would be good publicity for his country, Mobutu forked over $10 million, flew the fighters and their entourages to Kinshasa and began cleaning the blood of anti-government protesters from the floor of the outdoor arena where the fight was scheduled to take place that September.

Idolized by the people of Zaire for refusing to fight in Vietnam, the older boxer is greeted with chants of "Ali, bomaye!" which means "Ali, kill him!" Foreman, to Ali's great pleasure, was irritated with this turn of events, but Foreman was easily angered in those days. Ali later takes advantage of this weakness to defeat him in the ring. Using a combination of right-hand leads and verbal taunts, Ali tricks Foreman into punching himself out in the early rounds and subsequently flattens his opponent.

As Ali predicted:

"You think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned? Just wait'll I kick George Foreman's behind."

The boxing footage is terrific, but Gast has added archival film of other Ali-Foreman fights. Spike Lee, assorted sports columnists and other camp followers add compelling commentary, but Foreman, who was first devastated, then redeemed by the licking, isn't interviewed. And that's too bad, because it's almost as if Ali hammered something of himself into Foreman, who would go on to become every bit as affable as Ali. And then, Foreman, too, would challenge time.

Watching the picture, it's impossible not to think of Ali today, trembling and unsteady as he is. And you wonder as you stare at the dazzling young athlete: Would he do it all again if he knew the price? His biographer, Thomas Hauser, assures us that he would, that he loves every day of being Muhammad Ali.

Certainly, nobody ever looked as if he was having more fun than Ali does in "When We Were Kings." And the same goes for everybody around him -- except Foreman. Even cynical old sportswriters look like kids on Christmas morning when they recall memories of "Rumble in the Jungle" fever and those special moments they spent with Ali.

Though there were other kings on hand at the time -- Don, B.B., James "the King of Soul" Brown, not to mention Mobutu -- Ali was, in the words of producer David Sonenberg, "on a whole other level, he was King of the World."

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com..../wp-srv/style/longte

⁣Man on Wire tells the story of how Philippe Petit planned and carried out what has been called the greatest artistic crime of the 20th century. On 7 August 1974, Petit strung a 60-metre tightrope wire 450 metres above the ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre and walked across it, nine times.

Through interviews and re-enactments, the movie depicts the relationships between Philippe and his then girl friend Annie Allix, close friend Jean-Louise Blondeau and co-conspirators David Forman, Barry Greenhouse, Jim Moore and Alan Welner. The movie shows archival footage of Philippe walking between the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and between the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Philippe and his co-conspirators describe how they spied for weeks on the Twin Towers, tricked their way in using fake ID cards and hauled nearly one ton of equipment to the top floor.

The movie contains no live footage of the walk or re-enactment of it. Instead, the event is represented through still images and commentary by Philippe and the team members. Following the walk Philippe is arrested, taken for psychiatric evaluation and then released. The media hail Philippe a hero. We hear accounts from eyewitnesses telling how watching Philippe walk the wire was a once-in-a-lifetime gift. The movie ends with the main characters discussing how both the event itself and the resulting fame caused the breakdown of friendships and relationships.

⁣Marek Piotrowski (ur. 14 sierpnia 1964 r. w Dębe Wielkim koło Mińska Mazowieckiego) -- polski kick-bokser i bokser, zawodowy mistrz świata.
Kariera amatorska -- swoją karierę sportową rozpoczynał jako bardzo młody adept jujutsu, z czasem zainteresował się Karate Kyokushin. W 1984 r. zdobył w tej dyscyplinie mistrzostwo Polski juniorów. W 1985 r. powtórzył ten sukces w kategorii seniorów. W karate stoczył 13 oficjalnych pojedynków, wszystkie wygrał. W Lipcu 1993 r. stał się posiadaczem czarnego pasa (1 dan). Z początkiem 1987 r. rozpoczął uprawiać kick-boxing w formule full contact, mimo że dyscyplina ta była wówczas w Polsce zakazana.
11 października 1987 r. zdobył w Monachium amatorskie mistrzostwo świata w kategorii wagowej do 81 kg. Tego samego roku wygrał również mistrzostwo Polski, a na Węgrzech Puchar Świata, zostając uznanym za najlepszego zawodnika turnieju.
Kariera zawodowa -- w 1988 r. zdecydował się na wyjazd do USA, aby rozpocząć karierę zawodową. W październiku stoczył swoją pierwszą walkę. W Rockford znokautował Boba Handegana w 4. rundzie.

19 sierpnia 1989 r. w swej piątej walce za Oceanem zwyciężył jednogłośnie na punkty dotychczas niepokonanego Ricka „The Jet" Roufusa i zdobył zawodowe mistrzostwo Stanów Zjednoczonych organizacji PKC. Do jego nazwiska przyległ również ringowy przydomek Punisher.
4 listopada 1989 r. w Chicago pokonał Dona „The Dragon" Wilsona i został zawodowym mistrzem świata organizacji ISKA, PKC i FFKA.
Do 1991 r. stoczył sześć pojedynków, pokonując między innymi Boba „The Thunder" Thurmana oraz renomowanego Marka Longo. Był do tego momentu niepokonanym zawodnikiem na zawodowym ringu, legitymującym się bilansem 29-0-0 (19 KO). 22 czerwca 1991 r., pomimo problemów osobistych, stoczył rewanżowy pojedynek z Rickiem Roufusem, który przegrał w drugiej rundzie przez nokaut. Po tej porażce rozpoczął w lutym karierę w boksie zawodowym, wygrywając pierwszą walkę przed czasem w 4. rundzie. Następnie do 1992 r., chcąc odzyskać utracony tytuł MŚ, stoczył kilka walk w kickboxingu, wszystkie wygrywając.

W lipcu 1992 r. zdobył tytuł mistrza Ameryki Północnej wygrywając z Kanadyjczykiem Conradem Pla.
22 listpada 1992 r. stanął w Paryżu do pojedynku z wielokrotnym mistrzem Holendrem Robem Kamanem (zwanym także „Mr. Low-Kick"; 98 wygranych walk, 78 KO.) w formule low-kick. Przegrał przez TKO w siódmej rundzie po niezwykle dramatycznym boju. Po tej porażce raz jeszcze stanął do walki o utracone tytuły. Przez następne lata szukał szansy na rewanż z Kamanem i Roufusem, ale nigdy jej nie dostał.

22 czerwca 1993 r. pokonał w Montrealu przez TKO Michaela McDonalda. W tym samym roku zwyciężył Mike'a Winklejohna, zdobywając tytuł mistrz świata ISKA w formule oriental rules (odmiana dopuszczająca low-kick i uderzenia kolanem). W grudniu 1995 r. stoczył swoje ostatnie starcie w kickboxingu. W Krakowie pokonał Włocha Stefano Tomiazzo, zdobywając pas mistrza świata organizacji WKA i unifikując wszystkie światowe tytuły w full-contact. Tym samym stał się posiadaczem wszystkich najważniejszych pasów mistrzowskich: ISKA, KICK, PKC, WAKO-PRO, FFKA, WKA i TBC.

Równolegle ze startami w kickboxingu Piotrowski kontynuował karierę zawodowego boksera, staczając od 1992 do 1996 r. w sumie 21 pojedynków w wadze półciężkiej. Wygrał wszystkie.
Zawodową karierę zakończył 13 grudnia 1996 r. w Hanowerze wygraną walką bokserską. W 1997 r. dostał propozycję walki o zawodowe mistrzostwo świata w boksie organizacji IBF z Reggie Johnsonem, lecz ze względu na kłopoty zdrowotne musiał zrezygnować. W 2002 r. powrócił do Polski.

Wyróżnienia
W 1987 r. dostał nagrodę „Syrenki" od miesięcznika Sportowiec za największą niespodziankę sportową roku. Trzykrotnie wybierany do pierwszej dziesiątki najlepszych sportowców w Polsce w plebiscycie Przeglądu Sportowego (1987, 1989, 1990), dwukrotnie zajmując 2 pozycję. Prestiżowy magazyn Fighter klasyfikując największych kickboxerów lat 80., umieścił Piotrowskiego w wadze do 172 funtów (tj. 78 kg) na drugim miejscu. Dwukrotnie, w latach 1989 i 1994 został uznany przez amerykańskich fachowców kickbokserem roku. Został także wybrany przez amerykańską prasę na jednego z dwóch najlepszych fighterów lat 90. W 1991 r. Aleksander Bilik wydał książkę Kickbokser, opisującą karierę Piotrowskiego do roku 1990. W 2005 r. telewizja TVN24 nakręciła reportaż o Marku Piotrowskim zatytułowany „Wojownik" W 2005 r. powstał o nim nawet komiks pt. Kickbokser (zamieszczony w dodatku do Gazety Wyborczej). 2006 r. -- Marek Piotrowski otrzymał statuetkę Stanley Honorowy -- KICK BOXING

⁣"SUPERHUMAN: The Invisible Made Visible" documents the jaw-dropping experiences of individuals with extra-sensory powers that seem to defy the laws of physics known to man today. Producer and host Caroline Cory, who has her own extensive experience in the field of Consciousness Studies and Extra Sensory Perception, takes the viewers on an extraordinary journey to achieve tangible and measurable proof of these seemingly miraculous phenomena.


Through a series of groundbreaking on-camera scientific experiments, viewers will find themselves connecting the dots about the true nature of their own consciousness, the relation between mind and matter and discover whether they live in a simulated matrix or if they can have control over their physical reality and create a fulfilling human experience. The film ultimately shows that once the invisible worlds are made visible, this attained higher awareness will transform humans into superhumans.

⁣My Friend Rockefeller’Tells The Story Of The Infamous Imposter, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

There's no shortage of shocking stories about feigned identities - from Anna Delvey to John Meehan, con men and women are ubiquitous. But few stories involve a move from Germany, five identities, and the Rockefeller family name. The fascinating story of Christian Gerhartsreiter manages to include all three. Gerhartsreiter made his way across the US, ingratiating himself into wealthy communities until he settled in New York City. There, Gerhartsreiter married a Harvard grad and pretended to work in prestigious philanthropic positions, all the while hobnobbing with some of the richest and most prominent members of American high society.
Gerhartsreiter's life imploded when his wife decided to seek a divorce. Gerhartsreiter took their daughter, of whom he had lost custody, and prepared to sail abroad under a different identity. Police discovered the plan before he could escape and soon detained him. Authorities uncovered Gerhartsreiter's trail of lies, one of which implicated him in the slaying of a man and a missing woman.
The documentary My Friend Rockefeller tells Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter's real story. My Friend Rockefeller reviews suggest the film successfully analyzes why Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter used the name Clark Rockefeller, and describes what has happened since he was apprehended in 2008. As of 2019, he's serving time, possibly for the rest of his life. His story has inspired a movie called Who Is Clark Rockefeller?, as well as several books and podcast episodes. Gerhartsreiter will live in infamy, though likely not for the reasons he hoped.
Gerhartsreiter Used Five Different Identities Over 30 Years
After Gerhartsreiter took his daughter, police discovered that his friends knew him as a number of different identities. Some knew him as Chris Gerhart, a film student at the University of Wisconsin. He had also gone by Christopher C. Crowe when he worked as a TV producer in the late '80s. Others knew him as an alleged British royal, Christopher Chichester, who suddenly left Los Angeles in the 1980s following a couple's disappearance.
By the time Gerhartsreiter fled Boston with his daughter, his friends and his wife Sandra Boss knew him as Clark Rockefeller. The alleged Rockefeller worked and lived among some of the country's most wealthy.
Gerhartsreiter Successfully Convinced An Entire Community That He Inherited A Part Of The Rockefeller Fortune
The alleged Rockefeller convinced not one, but two communities of lawyers, doctors, artists, and writers that he was a descendant of the Rockefeller family. In New York, he took his prestigious friends to country clubs and showed off his "art collection," which authorities later determined was fake.
In Boston, Gerhartsreiter ingratiated himself with a community of wealthy people who often met at a Starbucks near his daughter's school. Gerhartsreiter became the director of the Algonquin Club and invited his elite friends, even if he did charge them for their visits. John Greene, who was adjacent to Gerhartsreiter's circle, said he easily convinced them he was a Rockefeller, claiming, "At a club like that - very Yankee, old-boys, blue blood - people get [excited] over the name."

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.ranker.com/list/my....-friend-rockefeller-

⁣In the 1960s, Ric O’Barry captured and trained dolphins for the hit television show Flipper. Regretful of his actions, he has since reinvented himself as a dolphin activist, working tirelessly to shine a light on the dark practices of dolphin capture and slaughter.

The Cove centres around O’Barry’s quest to expose the ugly reality of dolphin drive hunting — the practice of herding dolphins into a contained area where they will be caught and sold to aquariums or brutally killed for their meat.

In the Japanese seaside village of Taiji, this highly-profitable industry is conducted under a veil of secrecy. O’Barry is convinced that if the public could see actual footage of the butchery, they would demand that it be stopped. The Cove is part nature documentary, part spy thriller as the activist filmmakers use state-of-the-art technology and old-fashioned trickery to uncover the horrific hidden truths behind Taiji’s cove walls.

⁣“Project Nim,” a new documentary by James Marsh, is a probing, unsettling study of primate behavior, focusing on the complex dynamics of power, sex and group bonding in a species whose startling capacity for selfishness and aggression is offset by occasional displays of intelligence and compassion.
His name — a human imposition, like everything else in this creature’s remarkable, heartbreaking life — is Nim Chimpsky. In the 1970s he enjoyed (or endured) a season of fame as a research subject. Shortly after his birth at an primate behavior, Nim was taken from his mother’s side and delivered to New York, where he became part of an experiment, led by a Columbia professor, Herbert Terrace, to determine whether an ape could be taught human language.
It is a bit curious that Mr. Marsh’s film has nothing to say about the roots of Nim’s name, a jab at the influential linguist Noam Chomsky, whose theories about the innateness and uniqueness of language to humans were the implicit target of Dr. Terrace’s work. His project was an effort to discern if a chimpanzee could learn sign language and if that learning could proceed beyond the mimicry of specific gestures into the creation of grammatical sentences. If Nim could be raised more or less as a human child, and could master human communication, that would challenge the Chomskyan idea of language as a special, hard-wired trait fundamentally separating us from other animals. (Koko the gorilla, another celebrated signing ape born around the same time as Nim, also tested this hypothesis.)
“Project Nim” glances briefly at the scientific controversy that shaped Nim’s fate, but Mr. Marsh is less interested in comparatively dry matters of linguistics or neurobiology than in a humid, messy domain of identity and emotion that has, in the past, been the terrain of psychoanalysis. And of literature: Nim, thrown from one home to another, vulnerable to cruelty and neglect and dependent on the kindness of strangers, resembles the titular hero of a Dickens novel, an orphan buffeted by circumstances whose biography is also a fable of individual virtue and social injustice.
A helpless innocent compared with his protectors and tormentors, Nim bounces like a long-armed David Copperfield from one unnatural home to another — a Manhattan brownstone, an estate in the Bronx, a medical testing center upstate — living through periods of pastoral bliss and gothic horror. His tale is Dickensian, but also Kafkaesque, since he is at the mercy of powerful forces beyond his ken or control.
Red Peter, the learned ape in Kafka’s devastating “Report to an Academy,” dreams, above all else, of a “way out,” and to watch footage of the young Nim at play and in confinement is to infer that he must have known a similar longing. Unlike the Kafka character, however, this educated primate never acquired enough words to tell us his story, and so “Project Nim” relies on human interlocutors, some of whom cared about Nim a great deal, almost all of whom wind up telling us more about themselves.
They are a remarkable collection, often at odds and sometimes in bed with one another, with Nim as their pawn, rival or surrogate child as well as the blank slate on which they inscribe their fantasies and intellectual conceits. Dr. Terrace, speaking with precision and detachment in present-day interviews, is either resigned to being the film’s designated villain or oblivious to being set up for that role. His former colleagues, some of them also former lovers, don’t have much good to say, and the ’70s footage, showing an academic dandy with a comb-over, a BMW and a Burt Reynolds mustache, is hardly flattering.
For the first few years of Nim’s life, Dr. Terrace was the master of his fate, though not always a significant presence in the chimp’s day-to-day routine. After leaving Oklahoma, Nim was installed in the home of Stephanie LaFarge, where he became part of a household that included seven children, at least one dog and Ms. LaFarge’s husband, a poet and “rich hippie” who appears to have been Nim’s romantic rival.
Ms. LaFarge, an open and genial interview subject, drops a few casual bombshells testifying to what the psychobabble of our own time might call boundary issues. “It was the ’70s,” her now grown-up daughter Jenny Lee says, but even then, and even on the Upper West Side, it might have been a bit unusual for a woman to breastfeed a baby chimpanzee.
After a while, Nim was transferred to an estate in Riverdale, cared for and tutored by young people — most of them women — who come before Mr. Marsh’s camera in middle age to recall the pleasures and dangers of working with their spirited simian charge. It is hard not to be charmed by the affection that passes between these humans and the chimp, or to appreciate what seems to be a reciprocated effort at communication. But at the same time it is difficult to avoid a certain queasiness at the sight of a wild creature forcibly and irrevocably alienated from his nature — dressed in clothes, tethered and caged, smoking a joint out in the woods with his pals. You laugh, sometimes, to force the lump out of your throat.
There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns. He also engages in a bit of manipulation, using sleight-of-hand re-enactments and Dickon Hinchliffe’s nerve-rackingly melodramatic score to sensationalize a drama that hardly requires it.
Mr. Marsh, whose last documentary was the lovely, Oscar-winning “Man on Wire,” is a patient listener and an able storyteller, but the subject of “Project Nim” is so rich and strange that it might have benefited from the hand of a wilder, bolder filmmaker. An obsessive like Errol Morris or Werner Herzog might have pushed beyond pathos and curiosity, deeper into the literal no man’s land that lies between us and our estranged animal relations. But it is also possible that our language and our science do not equip us to understand the truth about Nim — or the truth about us that he may have discovered through years of rigorous, involuntary research.
“Project Nim” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Strong language, drug use, sexual references and depictions of animal suffering.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/0....7/08/movies/project-

⁣A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world. The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Robert Epstein and produced by Richard Schmiechen, was as groundbreaking as its subject.
One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it’s a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk’s message of hope and equality to a wider audience. This exhilarating trove of original documentary material and archival footage is as much a vivid portrait of a time and place (San Francisco’s historic Castro District in the seventies) as a testament to the legacy of a political visionary.
This documentary examines the political life of the self-proclaimed "Mayor Of Castro Street," N.Y. stockbroker turned San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California. Milk was elected to a City Supervisor position in the '70s, when a successful gay politician was an anomaly, but Milk made the most of his brief time in power. When Dan White killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone, the loss experienced by Milk's supporters was profound.
White robbed the gay-rights movement of a charismatic leader and eloquent voice, but he accidentally gave it something a smart political operative like Milk would surely have appreciated the power and value of: a bona fide martyr.