I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick -- he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance -- and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time "chick jobs" paid 40 to 80 percent less than "guy jobs," he'd get all irritated with you for being a drag. He's still an idiot, though, even if he's an idiot in quotation marks. That's kind of the problem with "Mansome," which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

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Solving the human race's worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu's film terms the "Hydro-Illogical Cycle," which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth's surface is covered in wet stuff, there's no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), "This says to me that there's some shortage I don't know about. When they show those photographs from space, there's a lot of water!"

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This scene occurs most of the way through Dean Shull's scattershot but entertaining documentary "California, 90420," which is sort of, kind of, a movie about Oaksterdam, the institution of higher learning -- ha! I kill myself! -- in Oakland, Calif., that provides the nation's first-ever cannabis-centered curriculum. (Yes, many of our campuses have provided such an education for decades, but none officially.) Although the film closely follows the failed 2010 campaign to legalize and regulate pot throughout the Golden State, it clearly gains currency from the recent federal raid on Oaksterdam, which has put the future of weed-ucation in jeopardy. (While California law allows local municipalities to license medical marijuana dispensaries, growing and selling the stuff remains a violation of federal law.)

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Yet it also was a time of innovation and creativity. As the system evolved we saw bold experiments like "PBL -- the Public Broadcasting Laboratory" and Al Perlmutter’s "The Great American Dream Machine," each a predecessor to the commercial TV magazine shows "60 Minutes" and "20/20."  The TV Lab, jointly run by David Loxton at WNET in New York and Fred Barzyk at WGBH in Boston, nurtured and encouraged the first generation of video artists — Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman among others — and the early documentary work of such video pioneers as Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the Downtown Community Television Center, Alan and Susan Raymond, and the wild and woolly, guerrilla camera crews of TVTV.

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For anyone eager to understand Russia's depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, "Putin's Kiss" is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can't explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians -- pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin -- she captures some essential drama in the nation's recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin's site is here.)

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In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy's documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There's really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include "The Thin Blue Line," "Roger & Me," "28 Up," "Hoop Dreams" and "Grizzly Man," and it's absolutely not coincidental that I've just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

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As he goes about his somewhat whimsical quest, some caution him that without that annual anchor, there’d be even less black history taught than before. He takes his campaign on the road; peers into the home of the month’s originator, Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.; meets with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; and goes to Virginia to see what black history means to big fans of the Confederacy.

Eventually he gets more serious about his task, realizing that while history may convey how we were, the way we tell history conveys how we are. And he’s had one direct effect: His mother, an activist, moves the date for a black history performance she had been planning out of February to help demonstrate that it is part of the fabric of U.S. history all year round.

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It was tough enough to track the social and political upheaval of the 1960s through domestic news coverage, let alone to pay attention to what the rest of the world was reporting. But journalists from abroad were fascinated by the roiling changes -- and often saw it quite differently.

Though U.S. network coverage of civil rights cruelties helped rally the country against the worst offenders in the South, coverage of revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party more often took J. Edgar Hoover’s extremist stance that it was the most dangerous internal threat to the U.S. Rarely did it look at the accomplishments of its free breakfast programs, community organizing and determination to stand up to police harassment and brutality.

Swedish newsmen and filmmakers who didn’t follow the FBI line came to America to learn what they could, looking at life in largely segregated black America, talking frankly and seriously with black leaders and closely following their trials.

Footage of the era, said to have been sitting in a Swedish basement for three decades, became the eye-opening documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” making its U.S. television debut on PBS’ “Independent Lens” Thursday night as part of its Black History Month series.

The modernist title owes in part to filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson using modern-day commentary, from musicians in many cases, to accompany the found footage. Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots add their contemporary revolutionary musing among commentaries by professors and historians.

The wealth of Swedish footage owes in part to the Panthers’ desire to see their movement as an international one, or one that certainly relied on support from outside the U.S.

It is the Panthers’ Embassy in Algeria where Eldridge Cleaver holds court, for example, far from the threat of FBI invasions. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to Stockholm to meet King Gustaf VI Adolf that are well preserved, and King’s traveling partner Harry Belafonte recalls the meeting.

Some of the earliest footage in the film shows a young Stokely Carmichael speaking in Stockholm in 1967, stating in the simplest terms the recent history of black movement in the U.S., carefully stepping beyond the nonviolent action approach by King.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience,” he points out coolly. “The United States has none.”

In some ways, it is the footage of Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and honorary “prime minister” for the Panthers, that is the revelation of “The Black Power Mixtape.” How suppressed has his voice been over the years, even at a time of black history mining?

It’s certainly eye-opening for modern-day commentator Kweli, who exclaims, “He has so much passion and fire inside of him,” yet remains quite cool. “He seemed like a regular dude.”

After telling reporters in Stockholm, “I’m not as patient as Dr. King,” Carmichael takes over a Swedish interview of his own mother in Chicago to get to the point: The family’s struggles and limited opportunities can be boiled down to the fact that they are black.

One gets the sense that Swedish journalists enjoyed visiting black ghettos, where they tried to get a taste of life as they paused for interviews with Huey P. Newton and Kathleen Cleaver.

The coverage was noted in the U.S. as well, when TV Guide in a cover story complained about its negativity. Swedish reporters interviewed the story’s writer, balancing it with the view of director Emile de Antonio, who dismisses TV Guide as “an absolute nothing magazine.”

Officially, Sweden had been so critical of America’s role in Vietnam that the U.S. pulled its ambassador from Stockholm in 1968 and ended diplomatic relations with the country altogether for a time in 1972, after Prime Minister Olof Palme compared the bombings of Hanoi with the worst atrocities of Nazis.

Whatever the diplomatic relations, Swedish journalists certainly took the black revolutionaries more seriously and were plainly excited to be the first TV reporters to talk to an imprisoned Angela Davis. Still, because they worked from the same script, the question soon boiled down to: Do you have to use violence to reach your goals? Davis, receiving her first media visitor, was plainly annoyed by this, in just about the only footage that’s in color rather than black-and-white.

“When somebody asks me abut violence, I just find it incredible,” she says. “What it means is that the people who ask have no idea what people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

The revolutionary tone of the film may provide grist for those on the right who erroneously see PBS as some kind of government-funded left-wing propaganda machine. When was the last time Louis Farrakhan was given a forum to talk about white devils?

But “The Black Power Mixtape” qualifies as a social history of a revolutionary movement, one quashed by a mid-1970s drug infusion to black neighborhoods that film participants are quite sure was caused by the government.

More than that, the modern voices in the film are resolute that lessons of the past need to be learned as the struggle goes on.

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Sundance has ditched its former tradition of having one main opening-night film, instead screening four different pictures, two American (a narrative feature and a documentary) and two foreign (ditto). This is all to the good, and avoids invidious comparisons with more Hollywood-centric festivals -- but there's little doubt this year that photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield's documentary "The Queen of Versailles" was first among equals. The unbelievable-but-true story of Florida real-estate tycoon David Siegel and his ex-beauty-queen wife Jackie, who nearly went broke while trying to build the biggest house in the country, is like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.

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Those inflammatory remarks are not mentioned in "Sing Your Song," the rich and fascinating new documentary about Belafonte's life and times, which was written and directed by Susanne Rostock but has clearly been authorized and approved by Belafonte and his family. We learn a great deal about Belafonte's central role as a towering figure of the early-'60s civil-rights movement, when he was confidant and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. But also unmentioned are his visits to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, his warm relations with the Soviet leadership before the fall of communism, or his assertion that George W. Bush was a greater terrorist than those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.

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The landmark 2010 Supreme Court case that loosened campaign finance restrictions was brought by Citizens United and centered on an anti-Hillary Clinton movie made by the group. Opposition to that ruling has been a consistent message of participants in Occupy movement.

The new film is to be called “Mic Check: The Untold Story of the Occupy Movement.” A participant at Occupy Wall Street recently received an interview request from a Citizens United producer that included this description of the film:

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"Everybody's getting excited about something that's not the real headline," explains filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack, a co-founder of the documentary-centric Cinema Eye Honors awards. "The headline is that the Academy is making big changes to the way it selects and nominates documentary films, and based on what I know so far, those changes are overwhelmingly positive."

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the new docu-Oscar rules, which go much further than eligibility issues, were largely pushed through by Michael Moore, who sits on the Academy's governing board. The intention behind the changes, including the bizarre-sounding NYT/LAT requirement, is to streamline a notoriously clunky and cliquey nominating process, and to ensure that the Oscar-winning documentary is "truly a theatrical motion picture, because that's what these awards are for," as Moore told indieWIRE.

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I've already recommended "A Separation," the marvelous Iranian drama that Sony Classics has in limited release, which is a clear favorite for the foreign-language Oscar. There's also Angelina Jolie's heartfelt and surprisingly convincing "In the Land of Blood and Honey," a romantic tragedy set against the dreadful Balkan wars of the 1990s. Alexander Payne's family melodrama "The Descendants," starring George Clooney as a beleaguered Hawaiian dad, opened modestly way back in November but continues to gain strength as an Oscar contender -- alongside this year's implausible front-runner, the black-and-white French silent comedy "The Artist." Meanwhile, even if Tomas Alfredson's new version of John le Carré's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," also in limited release so far, seems to have little or no Oscar juice, it's a beautifully executed, stylish and cold-hearted genre movie, arguably superior to Fincher's "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

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Well, OK, there is one major difference: Although the clinic's main product can be sold legally to any California resident with a medical permit to buy it, the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule 1 narcotic, as dangerous to the republic as crack cocaine. That means that in addition to the usual entrepreneurial headaches, D'Angelo and his brother Andrew, the clinic's general manager, live in fear of a massive bust by the DEA on whatever pretext -- a catastrophe that would wipe out everything they've built.

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Nor does Herzog directly address the question of how people like that should be punished, or whether it accomplished anything for the state of Texas to put the jug-eared, boyish Perry to death, eight days after Herzog interviewed him. You might call "Into the Abyss" a forensic film about murder in America, and it's definitely and perhaps intentionally reminiscent of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." But while Herzog does explore the gruesome details of the crime, he is ultimately more interested in the emotional and philosophical forensics of the Conroe case. He wants us to confront the fact that Perry and Burkett (who was spared execution and is now serving a 40-year sentence) were human beings despite their terrible crimes, and also to face the human damage they inflicted on an entire community.

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