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Top five Detox Friendly Drinks

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Top five Detox Friendly Drinks!

It’s the time of year again when we all contemplate ways to “better” ourselves and kick-start our new, healthy regimes with a detox – ridding ourselves of bad food and bad habits. Alcohol is often the first to go, along with caffeine and fizzy drinks, but have you considered what drinks could be beneficial when detoxing? Here Nutrition expert at Go Coco, Ross Currie, gives us his top five detox friendly drinks:

“Detoxing can be a struggle and often quite limiting. Keeping your fluid levels topped up during this time is vital to help your body rid itself of toxins and to stay hydrated – aiding brain function and helping to keep skin healthy. Aside from water, there are other drinks out there which can be a part of your detox. Here are my top five choices”:

1.       Tea – green, peppermint or ginger. Tea is a natural antioxidant, which protects your body from free radicals, pollutants and aging. Green tea can increase your metabolism, while ginger tea is great for digestion and aiding the absorption of food and peppermint tea

2.       Coconut water – Go Coco comes straight from the young, green coconuts of Thailand and is full of natural Isotonic properties and electrolytes, making them a great choice for rehydrating. It is also packed with vitamins and minerals, including twice as much potassium as a banana which is fantastic for a natural energy boost whilst being low calorie and it also plays an important role in regulating your heartbeat, insulin levels and muscle development.

3.       Fresh or raw pineapple juice – Pineapples contain many vitamins and enzymes that will offer health benefits during a detox, including Bromelain – a natural anti-inflammatory that encourages healthy digestion by helping the body break down proteins, and Thiamine (which belongs to the vitamin B group) which boosts your metabolism by helping your body convert carbohydrates into energy

4.       Lemon water – Lemons are a great source of citric acid, calcium, potassium, magnesium and phosphorous. Drinking fresh lemon juice with water (hot or cold) will benefit your detox on many levels by assisting your digestion, stimulating the liver and cleansing the bloody stream. Try drinking a cup of hot water and lemon first thing, to kick start your system.

5.       Fresh Carrot Juice – As well as containing Vitamin C and A, carrot juice also contains carotenes which are a great anti-oxidant. Carrot juice is also a diuretic and can help to reduce water retention, plus it’s very low in calories.

Have You Seen… Five Documentaries To Seek Out (Part Two)

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This is the second part of my list of five documentaries that I love and hope that you will discover and love too. The first part, in which I lurch from historical curios to sexual fetishes and underground comics, can be found here: Part One.

 

The Sorrow and The Pity (1969)

 

Perhaps due to its appearance as an anti-date movie in Annie Hall, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and The Pity is often unfairly relegated to the punch line of jokes about gruelling and dull ways to spend an evening. It’s true that Ophuls’ film is a pretty mammoth undertaking but for those willing to persevere it can also be an immensely rewarding one. Filmed in 1969 (although not released until 1981 due to objections from the French government) and clocking in at a mammoth 251 minutes, Le chagrin et la pitié (to give it its French title) is an in-depth look at the behavior of the inhabitants of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand during Nazi occupation.

 

In a sense The Sorrow and the Pity could almost be watched as a companion piece to Albert Camus’

A striking poster for the film.

powerful1947 novel La Peste, which deals with the same subject by using disease as a metaphor for occupation and I will admit that having this book in the back of my mind certainly helped me clarify my experience of this gargantuan film. There is a famously enigmatic quote at the end of this novel, ‘What we learn in time of pestilence [is] that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.’ It is The Sorrow and The Pity’s inability to either confirm or deny this statement that makes it so compelling and the audience is forced to try (and fail) to make the moral judgments that the film so stubbornly avoids.

 

     The Sorrow and The Pity is split into two parts. The first of these, entitled The Collapse focuses on the French Resistance and particularly on Pierre Mendès-France, a Jewish political figure who was a key member of this group. The second, entitled The Choice, presents us with the other side of the coin recounting the story of Nazi collaboration particularly that of Christian de la Mazière, a member of the upper classes who fought under the banner of Fascism. As well as these key figures and other well-known persons (including British primeminister Anthony Eden), Ophuls also spoke with the ordinary townspeople who were faced with the impossible choice of collaboration or resistance. This puts a very human face on this grueling situation and by the film’s close you really do feel as if you have lived among these haggard, corrupt, heroic and deeply relatable people in their little town of Clermont-Ferrand. Perhaps the most remarkable and uncomfortable thing about the film is it’s lack of moral judgments particularly given the film’s relative proximity (just over twenty years) to the events it describes. Anthony Eden provides us with perhaps the most useful way of processing this when he states that, ‘One who has not suffered the horrors of an occupying power has no right to judge a nation that has.’ By the end of The Sorrow and The Pity it is impossible to argue with him and we realize that this is perhaps the closest we’ll get to an understanding of Camus’ inscrutable sentiment.

 

The Sorrow and the Pity is currently available on region 2 DVD and is well worth setting aside time to watch.

 

 

Capturing the Friedmans (2004)

 

The Friedmans celebrate during happier times.

Arnold and Elaine Friedman and their three sons were pretty much your archetypal middle class family living in a small town in upstate New York in the 1980s. He was an upbeat and well-liked teacher who ran a computer class out of their basement while she was a hardworking housewife whose rather serious demeanour made her the butt of her husband and three sons’ high-spirited jokes. Like many upwardly mobile families of the period, their favourite pastime was recording their mundane yet happy lives on their personal video camera (a relatively new innovation at this time).  They were content, down to earth and almost aggressively normal, like a Jewish 80s Cleavers. All this came crashing down in November 1987 when their typical suburban house was raided after Arnold was accused of molesting several children in his computer class. Extraordinarily, the family did not give up their beloved hobby and continued to record every tense discussion and blistering argument on videotape as more and more allegations were made, son Jesse was accused and their family began to disintegrate.

 

Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmansassembles this startling footage and intercuts it with interviews

The accusations tore the family apart

with the family, police and victims. What makes the films so gripping is that it is cast in the mould of a thriller with each new piece of evidence or witness testimony contradicting something that the audience had earlier been convinced was fact. The result of this is that you are never really sure of anything except the truly subjective nature of truth and, by the film’s close, it is almost impossible to make any definitive judgements about Arnold and, to a larger degree, Jesse’s guilt. This style is undoubtedly effective and makes the film breathtakingly gripping. However, its moral implications have opened it up to some justified criticism and it is hard to watch the film in the same way now that news has emerged that Jarecki (who had previously declared himself to be impartial) actually funded Jesse Friedman’s appeal.

 

What earns Capturing the Friedmans a place on this list though is it’s unique, self-documented insight into a family in turmoil; the way each family member deals with the traumatic events is a master class in psychology and it is staggering to consider why on earth they chose to film themselves going through this horrible ordeal. Elaine Friedman is perhaps the most fascinating character in this respect, the seemingly emotionally fenced-off wife who was oblivious to her husband and son’s crimes. She is also arguably the most sympathetic of the Friedmans and it is heartbreaking to watch as her family continues to favour their father, frequently taking sides against Elaine even after he is prosecuted for the most despicable crimes. A great documentarian will often start with one subject and allow it to develop organically into something entirely different. This is certainly the case with this film, which started out life when Jarecki interviewed son David Friedman, who is a clown by profession, for a documentary he was making on children’s entertainers in New York City. That this light-hearted film spawned  Capturing The Friedmans is as intriguing as it is darkly ironic.

 

Capturing The Friedman’s is currently available on Region 2 DVD and come with a wealth of special features including Jarecki’s ‘Just a Clown’, the documentary on New York clowns that introduced him to David Friedman, and a wealth of documents (including a psychologist’s assessment of the victims) which are provided as DVD-Rom content.

 

Read Part 3, in which I discuss my favourite feature length documentary.

Charles Rivington can be followed on Twitter at @crivington.

Have You Seen… Five Documentaries To Seek Out (Part One)

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   In a special three part ‘Have You Seen…’, Charles Rivington explains that reality does not necessarily bite…

 

Reality is a dirty word. With the recent tragic suicide of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Russell Armstrong hitting headlines, the debate about the cruelty of so-called ‘reality’ television has once again captured public imagination. I’m not here to debate the culpability of the show but there is a well-known saying that suggests, and I’m paraphrasing, that every innovation or new piece of technology, even those conceived with the best of intentions, will eventually be used to bring mankind one step closer to destruction. In a sense, this is exactly what happened to the documentary genre when its techniques and style were first appropriated, bastardised and reduced to their most shallow and cruel form by the reality tv docu-soap. I believe that, now more than ever, we should learn to value, appreciate and celebrate reality again, not Bravo’s ‘reality’ but the unscripted, impartial and thought-provoking reality of cinema’s great documentaries. This edition of ‘Have You Seen…’ is therefore a little bit different as, rather than focusing on one film, I have decided to focus on a genre, that of feature-length documentaries. Due to its length, I have split it into three parts.

 

The documentary genre  is as old as cinema itself and almost everything you can imagine has been the subject of a documentary film.  Narrowing this vast category down to a definitive ‘five greatest’ would thus be pretty much impossible not to mention entirely redundant given the subjectivity of this criteria (how do we define greatness? Is my great the same as your great and is your great the same as Leonard Maltin’s great? Probably not.). Having said this, I do believe that a great documentary, regardless of whether its subject is penguins or the Second World War or a spelling competition, should challenge its viewers and force them to consider an idea or a point of view that might never have occurred to them. Whereas the great documentary-maker simply observes and questions without judgement, the great documentary connects with the audience by insisting that they think for themselves, forcing them to evolve from passive observers to active participants. This list is simply five films that did that to me.

 

I've heard great things about Hoop Dreams

I have limited the field to just feature length films (no Attenborough here I’m afraid) and excluded films that I think most people have already seen and therefore don’t fall under the remit of ‘Have You Seen…’ (Bowling For Columbine and Man on Wire for example are both wonderful films but are excluded for this reason).  I should probably still apologise in advance because I am bound to have omitted one of your personal favourites either because I don’t share your opinion or because I simply haven’t seen it yet (Hoop Dreams, often regarded as one of the greatest documentaries of all time, is omitted from this list for the simple reason that I’ve never watched it). These five films are presented in no particular order. Feel free to disagree/put forward your own suggestions/advertise a dating website for rich singles in the comments below.

 

The Early Actualities of the Lumière Brothers (1895)

 

Having spent quite a bit of time defining the rules for this list, I have gone and broken at least one of them in the first entry because this is not one film, but rather a collection of one-reel films – the first ten of which were debuted at the Grand Café in Paris in 1895. It is also arguable the extent to which they are documentaries as given their short length (one-reel is usually less than a minute) it seems that most of them were probably at least partly choreographed and the comic L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled) is often hailed as the first narrative film. Regardless of this, they are remarkable records of a bygone age and are therefore more than worthy of mention.

 

Filmed in their hometown of Lyon, Auguste and Louis Lumière’s fascinating actualities, among the first films ever made, give us an unparallelled glimpse at the lives of the French working class at the turn of the century. Among these first ten are La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon)

The Lumiere Brothers

and Les Forgerons (The Blacksmiths). Their depiction of the working class, and the fact that they were screened to audiences of all backgrounds, makes them as much a document and engine (pun intended) of social change as they are the remarkable first gasps of an emerging technology. Of course, at the time, the draw of these films was the amazing technology on display and the Lumière’s cinématographe, a device that recorded, developed and projected films, was the real star. These early audiences, used to the flat painted backgrounds of the stage, were particularly impressed by the capturing of nature on film and it is said that the popularity of films such as Repas de bébé (Baby’s Breakfast, which featured Auguste’s own family thus making it the first home movie) owed more to the movement of the leaves in the background than to the film’s charming subject matter.  Because of this, this early, pre-narrative period of cinema is often referred to as ‘The Cinema of Attractions’  (a term coined by film scholar Tom Gunning). Nowadays, the opposite is true and it is these actualities’ remarkable depiction of every day life in France at the turn of the century that makes them so fascinating.

 

For a set of ‘local films for local people’ featuring an interesting look at British life during a similar, slightly later period, check out Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon’s actualities which were often filmed and projected on the same day and feature many other entries into the ‘factory-gate’ subgenre.

 Both the Lumière Brothers and Mitchell and Kenyon films are currently available on DVD. As they are out of copyright, they can also be legally watched online for free and are relatively easy to find.

 Crumb (1994)

Part of my fascination with the documentary genre lies in its wonderful breadth. Anything from pet cemeteries to the horror of war to cave paintings to parrots, when handled in the right way can make, and have made, incredible documentaries. That this list’s second entry should be so wildly far-removed from its first is a testament to this breadth and I make no apologies for the jarring shift in tone. I can’t begin to imagine what the Lumières and Mitchell and Kenyon would have made of Terry Zwigoff’s moving and shocking Crumb, a film apparently so depraved that the 1996 Academy Award nominating committee switched it off after only 20 minutes, but I like to think that, unlike the prudish Oscar snobs, they would have persevered and recognised it as a worthy and spellbinding entry into the genre they helped to create.

 

     Crumb is very hard to describe and like the best documentaries doesn’t tell you how you should respond to it so that laughter, tears and repulsion are all equally valid reactions. It takes as its subject Robert Crumb, the

A self-portrait of R. Crumb. He's not kidding either...

subversive comic artist most famous for creating Fritz the Cat, the counter-cultural slogan, ‘Keep on Truckin’’ and a myriad of other works that were at the forefront of the underground comics movement of the 1960s. I have to admit that I was wholly unfamiliar with Crumb’s work before I saw this film (I only sought it out because I’d seen and loved Zwigoff’s rather more mainstream, Ghost World) and even now I’m not sure if I can say that I actually like his drawings with their garishly warped figures and often challenging and unsettling depictions of women and African Americans. However, as is the case with many great documentaries, the ostensible subject is merely a way in to much richer territory and the heart of Crumb lies not in these drawings (although their geneses are often as fascinating as they are disturbing) but in the man himself and his bizarre and tragic family, most notably his disturbed and equally artistic brothers, Maxon, who developed a penchant for sitting on nails and sexually harassing women, and Charles, a recluse who committed suicide before the film was released.

 

Featuring various interviews with family members, friends, critics and ex-girlfriends as well as his surprisingly well-adjusted wife and daughter, Crumb paints a picture of an intelligent and sensitive man who escaped a

Robert Crumb and friends

horrible childhood and went on to find salvation through art when others around him who were not as lucky.  Crumb is a disturbing yet frequently amusing portrayal of mental illness and people on the fringes of the society that is frequently depressing but also strangely relatable. Crumb himself is a tapestry of quirks and odd sexual fetishes. As a young child he developed an attraction to Bugs Bunny to the extent that he would carry a picture of the cartoon rabbit around with him, periodically taking it out to look at it and much of the film deals with his life-long obsession with women with disproportionately large hindquarters. Despite these quirks Robert Crumb emerges as an oddly charming character whose quiet sense of humour and bafflement and disgust at the world around him is remarkably sympathetic, perhaps even inspirational.

 

Needless to say, Crumb is unsuitable for children and the prudish but if you can stomach it, it is a very rewarding experience. It is currently available on Region 2 DVD (annoyingly this print does not feature the fantastic Roger Ebert commentary that is available to our American cousins, so if you watch the film and like it – and have a region free DVD player – the Region 1 DVD is well-worth seeking out for this alone).

 

Coming Soon… Part 2!