Contradicting Popular Opinion :
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
Intro
We are going short, and stream of conscious this week. If you want more of me, check out my recent DVD reviews. They are highly educational!
An examination of the current stat of the “Documentary” film.
I am a documentary whore.
I freely admit this thing.
Does PBS have a special about M-theory?
Sign me up!
Does The History channel have an eight part series on Sparta?
I better pop a tape in!
But of late, I find there are entire classes of “documentaries” that I can’t sit through, or actively avoid. Take for instance, Super-Size Me. I am angry at this film.
Why is a grown man angry at a documentary before he even saw the dang thing? Simple, after the flick I could no longer get my super-size Diet Coke. I’ve had insulin dependent diabetes for about ten years. Unless it is a meal time, I can’t get a snack. I could however get a giant pop from McDonald’s, a pop with no sugar nor calories, a pop that actually helped regulate my blood sugar, a pop that was suspiciously discontinued after that film.
My wife netflixed the dang film a while ago. It took me all of 3 minutes to come to the conclusion that “documentary” is not really an appropriate title for such a thing.
Super-Size Me is not a documentary; it is PERFORMANCE ART. There is no more damning a thing I can say. In my school of thought, performance artist is the biggest insult you can call somebody. A class 5 pejorative. A pariah shunned even by stilt walkers.
Sperlock, you are a f*cking performance artist.
Also netflixed by the wife was something called, Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Prices. Holding the red envelope in my hand, I could feel the ole Spidey-sense tingling. I said, “This is just going to be 2 hours of anti-corporate left-wing propaganda right?”
Then, I slid the disc out of its sleeve, revealing the disgruntled Wal-Mart logo, and all doubt was removed.
The wife and I managed to sit through about 30 minutes worth of sob stories before ejecting the thing from our player and sealing back in its netflix containment unit, and running it back to the mailbox for fear of seeing any more of it.
It strikes me how fatuous people can be. The Wal-Mart employees will in one breath mention the giant stack of applications, and then in the next talk about how they don’t make enough money. Maybe I’ve been around the U of C too long, and the knowledge of all those Nobel Prize wining economists has diffused into my brain, but doesn’t that strike everybody as logical? If there are scores of people willing to do Job A for x amount of dollars, person doing Job A won’t make much more than x amount of dollars.
The first 30 minutes of the flick just showed that Wal-Mart had a successful business model. DAMN THEM! What Wal-Mart: tHCoLP gave me was not a documentary, but rather an opinion piece supported by appeals to emotion.
It was at that point which I cursed Michael Moore for poisoning the well. But it’s too easy to blame him. He’s a big target.
Maybe Disney is to blame. They’re misinformation kings! A Disney documentary is what started the myth of lemming suicide after all.
But hell, there are still a lot of decent to great documentaries out there. Apart from the art house interstitials, The Fog of War was a good movie. The Ramones movie was captivating enough, as was the Dylan flick.
There still is a lot of fine stuff out there.
The question you might have is, “Why documentaries now?”
The answer is simple. The Croc Hunter. They won’t show the Croc Hunter’s death video. This thing got me thinking about Grizzly Man. That film’s subject videotaped his own death, being eaten by a bear. Mind you, he taped it with the lens cap still on. We weren’t afforded the opportunity to listed to the audio, nor see any of the gory details of the remains.
Why would anybody want to see such things? Some sort of perverse addiction, perhaps?
It amounts to a snuff film right?
Well no. With Grizzly Man, the “grizzly man” was at all times laughable. He was a freakish idiot who got what was coming to him. At least that is how it seemed in presentation. BUT if you share the gorier details of his demise, it at least allows you to pity the silly douche.
That poor stupid silly douche.
