I’ve been on a real documentary kick as of late and here are a few that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who calls Louisville, Kentucky home.

When We Were Kings – Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he was and is the product of both the racial tensions and the revolutionary times and no film shows all of those sides better than When We Were Kings. Ali has become a transcendent figure in his old age – but at the time of the Ali/Foreman fight in 1974, he was still a divisive figure. He went to jail because he refused the Vietnam draft, he joined the Nation of Islam, and to top it off he was a gregarious civil rights activist. But at the core of his being, beneath the pride and the talent was a man who cared deeply about where he came from, who he was and what he and his people could achieve. And all that from a dyslexic street kid from Louisville.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Like Ali, Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville and took his natural talent and revolutionary thinking and helped to transform the world. Ali and Thompson ultimately shared a similar fate – crippled by the sport they entered into – Ali crippled by Parkinson’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s drug abuse. Their heydays were amazing shows of force and talent spawned by unbelievable creativity, and their slides into the autumns of their lives are terribly sad.

Harlan County USA

While I might live in Kentucky, I love the rest of the state, from the mines in the east to the lakes in the west and the horses in the middle. And while the people in between might not share the same values that I do here in the “big city” of Louisville, they are nonetheless my people and people that shaped the person who I am today. Harlan County USA is a fascinating snapshot of life in a mining town in Harlan County, Kentucky in the early 1970s. An gripping tale of workers and the machine – and what happens when a people have so few options to survive.

There are two people that I regard as having helped me to understand my cultural identity – to understand what it means to be an American, to be a Southern boy, to live in a country made of free people. One is Jack Kerouac and the other (and likely the most important) is Hunter S. Thompson.

His writing conveys a wild, insatiable interest and keen bead on his subjects – be they the Kentucky Derby, race relations in Louisville, the wild flipside of the American Dream, or politics. He taught me that all writing is journalism, and journalism is much more than writing. His madcap dispatches blend furious imagination with a seam of truth that runs so deep as to ground the whole escapade like a seasick man clutching a ships railing. Some of his work is a tough read, no doubt, but it’s all worth it for those moments of pristine clarity that ring out like gunshots through his work.

Gonzo, a movie about Hunter S. Thompson is soon to be released in theaters. Trailer below:

A couple of choice quotes “after the jump”…
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