Posts from the ‘documentaries’ Category

Oct 17

The Thin Blue Line

Errol Morris is one of my favourite filmmakers. The Thin Blue Line is one of his most compelling pieces of work, which is saying a lot when you consider masterpieces like The Fog of War and Gates of Heaven. Morris’ insatiable curiosity has been the catalyst for his creative process and his ability to delve into stories without intruding on them is what sets him apart from other documentary filmmakers. His style is undeniable and incredible.

The Thin Blue Line is concerned with the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer during a traffic stop. Morris has apparently originally planned to do a movie about prosecution psychiatrist Dr. James Grigson, also known as Doctor Death because of his testimony leading to 100 death sentences. After hearing Grigson talk about Randall Dale Adams, Morris became sceptical about the official line of events from a particular crime and The Thin Blue Line was born.

Oct 3

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Gates of Heaven

Gates of Heaven is more than a movie about pet cemeteries, although that subject actually proves to be most interesting in and of itself. This Errol Morris documentary is about how human beings handle life and about how human beings find meaning in, yes, running pet cemeteries. The magic in this movie is in how its humans love and cherish the memories of their pets, sure, but the wonder is in how the humans that run and operate and fail to operate pet cemeteries come to find understanding of their “calling.”

The standard Morris style is here, with no narration or flashy stuff. It’s told through raw interviews, neatly put together without the use of effects or other distractions. The real human beings tell the story, as they should, with real emotions and real humour sitting at the core of the tales they weave. As it is, Gates of Heaven doesn’t instruct its viewers at all. Is it a satire? Or is it a love story? Or is it just about dead pets? The choice is yours.

Jul 5

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It Might Get Loud

David Guggenheim’s It Might Get Loud goes beyond discussing the guitar and delves into what makes an artist an artist. Set primarily as an exploratory documentary featuring Jack White, The Edge and Jimmy Page discussing the guitar, the documentary naturally evolves into a broader journey that demonstrates the differences and similarities between the three musicians. It is as organic a documentary as I’ve seen on the subject of music.

The movie isn’t particularly coherent or well-organized, but it does provide plenty of insight into the guitar-playing and the history-making of the three musicians involved. The “Summit,” a meeting of the three guitarists to discuss the instrument and to play a few tunes, is the core of the film but Guggenheim delivers so much more by dropping in on each of the artist’s in their home territories and following them as they recount their first guitar experiences and how they came to realize the artists they really were.

Jun 22

Standard Operating Procedure

Filmmaker Errol Morris is probably the finest working documentarian today. Driven by the power of understanding, his 2008 picture Standard Operating Procedure is a staggering examination of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003. The focal point of the documentary is the photography. Amazingly but perhaps not surprisingly, there are thousands of photographs depicting detainee abuse at the prison and we all have likely seen them. Morris fearlessly and decisively dives in the middle to search for meaning.

Morris’ picture doesn’t judge or present a political point of view. Instead, it questions the intention of the pictures and their very existence. Why were so many pictures taken of such abuses? Who was behind them? Who was in the photographs and what do they think about what they’ve done? Morris gathers unflinching evidence, using re-enactment footage to further explore what really happened in that prison.

Jun 9

I.O.U.S.A.

Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A. takes a look at the financial situation in the United States and attempts to zero in on the problems using insightful graphics and graphs, but its view of things is too short-sighted and too simplistic to register with much of an impact. The documentary doesn’t have the reach or ambition of Michael Moore’s superior Capitalism: A Love Story and attempts to pin a complicated problem on one or two “entitlement programs” rather than on the larger philosophical issues at the core.

Much of the praise for I.O.U.S.A. appears to come from the way that Creadon’s documentary breaks down the “big math” to smaller components to make it easier for the average viewer to digest. The problem here lies with the fact that the approach is overly simplistic and it glosses over incredibly problematic segments of the economic dilemma in favour of grabbing at its core hot button issues.

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." – Alfred Hitchcock

Posts from the ‘documentaries’ Category

The Thin Blue Line

Gates of Heaven

It Might Get Loud

Standard Operating Procedure

I.O.U.S.A.

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