I saw this entirely because it was playing at the right time near where I was and it looked moderately interesting.
This is a documentary about industrial fishing and the upcoming tragedy of many fish populations being over-caught and going extinct. Having just seen the documentary 'Earth', I was happy to see that that photography in this (produced by BBC, the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic) was as nice as the Disney picture, and in some cases even nicer.
The film was a nice mixture of talking heads and then those guys going out into the world to show what they were talking about. It is effective in making me realize that eating bluefin tuna is really, really bad... but it also made it seem that eating any fish is bad... which is bad, I think. It didn't give me a good alternative or give any examples of good fishes to eat....
I think one of my biggest pet peeves recently is documentaries that show a website to visit in the end credits. I guess I want the film to exist as its own stand-alone work - and tying it to a live website makes the film look like one part in a larger argument... I also wonder how those sites are kept up years later - like can you still visit the site connected to An Inconvenient Truth? (I just visited it and it has an update that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize in October 2007 - how new!) Food, Inc. also had a website... ugh.
This is a visually pretty movie (nice shots of fish swimming) with a good message.... but it was very Frontline-ish and not very cinematic...
Stars: 2 of 4
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If Year One has a website, why shouldn't documentaries? In fact, documentaries make more sense to have companion websites than most films. If the film is even remotely good, there should be a wealth of further information they can provide. I wish Religulous had had a better website that gave more of the overlapping myth info he mentioned briefly. And there's no reason to expect them to be active and kept up years later. It's hardly a slam on the film or their good intentions.
ReplyDeleteI think the website is an admission that the filmmaker told less than a complete story. Fine - they can have websites, but the idea always is 'if you would like more information, go to the website' as if the documentary is only one part of a bigger polemic - that there's some massive campaign for whatever it is that the film is talking about. I would rather have the film be a complete argument/work in its own right. The best documentaries never had extra info after the film: Woodstock, The Last Waltz, Gimme Shelter, Brother's Keeper, The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me. I think it is important to keep the website updated - otherwise you're admitting your movie is small and not worth people's time in the future. What happens if you watch an Inconvenient Truth now - and there's a suggestion that there was more good info that was not in the film but was on a website - now the site hasn't been updated for two years... so Global Warming must be solved! Hurray!
ReplyDeleteObviously, Woodstock and Roger & Me and The Thin Blue Line would have had substantial websites...if websites existed back then, which of course they didn't. And every single film made today has a website. Every single one, not just documentaries. So complaining that there's a website is like complaining that there's a TV ad for the film. But it's not an admission, just taking an advantage of the limitless depth a website can provide. And of course websites don't stay active forever. Movies have a finite life, even if DVDs live forever. Look, it's an online dialogue!
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