Always the Critic
First, a food review: Chips Ahoy! White Fudge Chunky are almost too good to be true. If the next time you see me, I'm 300 pounds, you'll know who to blame.
Second, a film review. Cory and I went to see The Fog Of War tonight at the Columbus Film Festival. It was excellent, which I guess explains why it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary last year. However, I have to admit, I like my documentaries to be a little more user-friendly. I've seen several documentaries in the last several years, many of them Oscar-nominees and Oscar-winners. I loved Spellbound, because of its humor and the human drama. I loved Winged Migration because of the amazing photography. I loved Bowling For Columbine for too many reasons to count.
The Fog of War was obviously much more serious, much less user-friendly. It focused completely on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who by the way, looks damn good for a guy that's pushing 90. I guess one thing I didn't like was the film's dependance on stock footage. The editors did a fantastic job of putting it all together, but much of the footage they used looked staged.
The other thing that really bothered me was the overwhelming influence of the MTV style on film and documentaries. For a century, the jump-cut was a cardinal sin of filmmaking. If you had to edit someone mid-sentence, you covered up the ugly jump-cut with a cut-away shot of other video. Then MTV came along and introduced it's "edgy" style... which is actually nothing more than sheer laziness. Now you see jump cuts on everything except the nightly news. Actually, you see jump-cuts there, too... but it's not stylistic... it's just poor workmanship.
On the one hand, I respect the filmmakers for saying "yeah... we edited his words. Deal with it." It makes them more trustworthy in a way, because they aren't hiding the fact that they edited him mid-sentence. On the other hand, they edited him so much, sometimes four or five times in one single sentence, that it was more than a little distracting.
First, a food review: Chips Ahoy! White Fudge Chunky are almost too good to be true. If the next time you see me, I'm 300 pounds, you'll know who to blame.
Second, a film review. Cory and I went to see The Fog Of War tonight at the Columbus Film Festival. It was excellent, which I guess explains why it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary last year. However, I have to admit, I like my documentaries to be a little more user-friendly. I've seen several documentaries in the last several years, many of them Oscar-nominees and Oscar-winners. I loved Spellbound, because of its humor and the human drama. I loved Winged Migration because of the amazing photography. I loved Bowling For Columbine for too many reasons to count.
The Fog of War was obviously much more serious, much less user-friendly. It focused completely on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who by the way, looks damn good for a guy that's pushing 90. I guess one thing I didn't like was the film's dependance on stock footage. The editors did a fantastic job of putting it all together, but much of the footage they used looked staged.
The other thing that really bothered me was the overwhelming influence of the MTV style on film and documentaries. For a century, the jump-cut was a cardinal sin of filmmaking. If you had to edit someone mid-sentence, you covered up the ugly jump-cut with a cut-away shot of other video. Then MTV came along and introduced it's "edgy" style... which is actually nothing more than sheer laziness. Now you see jump cuts on everything except the nightly news. Actually, you see jump-cuts there, too... but it's not stylistic... it's just poor workmanship.
On the one hand, I respect the filmmakers for saying "yeah... we edited his words. Deal with it." It makes them more trustworthy in a way, because they aren't hiding the fact that they edited him mid-sentence. On the other hand, they edited him so much, sometimes four or five times in one single sentence, that it was more than a little distracting.
Labels: movies
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