I felt cheated? - spoiler

I saw the trailer and read the review. Now that I know the characters are actors, I am actually much less inclined to want to see it now, contrary to what Gary Burns had said about worrying that no one would see it if it were straight documentary.

Who wants to see a fake documentary? Either do a documentary film about an interesting subject matter (which this is) or do a fictional film about the same subject matter.... "Faking the Real Thing" makes no sense.

Apparently the people in the suburbs weren't scary enough so they had to fake it. Killed any impact the movie could have had so I don't know why they bothered - oh wait, it's propaganda so lying is ok.

"Hi,
I think it should be fairly obvious that the director's choice of using actors instead of non - actors was a conscious and, I think, clever one. The whole point of the film is that the modern suburb is a artificial sham, a poor substitute for the homey and comfortable places older generations grew up in, and so the director shows actors depicting what should be real life circumstances, but they ring as false as the so-called communities the film describes."



I don't thing it was so clever. I think it was disingenuous, dishonest, and biased to make a point that fit into the producers' tidy little view of the suburban world as they see it. So they thought they had to lie and use actors because their points were so weak? The movie said nothing new that hasn't been said before about suburbs, but of course implied that the "concept of suburbs are bad, North America is bad, we should live more like Europe, etc. Typical self-hating, self-loathing documentary subjects that are supposed to make you feel guilty for what - living your life? Then they bring on the so-called societal experts who act all morose and claim that suburbs are the end of civilization as we know it. They wring their hands and shake their heads - THEY are the ones who need to get a life! They go back to their cushy life of academia, where they are tenured for life and don't have to worry about the consequences of their foolish actions or words.

Typical that this "documentary" ended up on the Sundance Channel, home of all one-sided, liberally-biased documentaries.


"Where's the rest of this moose?"

Making the family fictional doesn't make the whole thing any less true. You can meet those people any day in any suburban strip mall.

The car companies, oil industry, and tire companies conspired to create highways and suburbia. They bought up the street cars in cities like L.A, then dismantled them. They pushed the move to highways, single cars, trucking, and suburbia. The auto industries worked together to eliminate public transit, railroads, and turn America into a concrete wasteland of sprawl.

Salads, with all due respect to your film classes, there IS a genre of movie called "mockumentary."

I sympathize with the people who felt cheated. I might've felt that way, too, had not the filmmakers given such obvious clues starting from the get-go, filming a child climbing a cell tower. Previous posters mentioned that and the the artificiality of the car repair business, the over-precociousness of the boy, and, most obviously, the "Waiting for Guffman" play. They might as well have put a subtitle below those rehearsal and performance scenes with the flashing words "MOCKUMENTARY! MOCKUMENTARY!" It's my own fault I swallowed it all hook, line and sinker.

Great movie.