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tyboulder2's Replies
I stopped watching this movie during my first attempt because its low budget, amateurish quality got to me, as did the director-playing-investigative reporter piece. But I gave it another try and it grew on me. The production value shouldn't matter too much if there’s a good story there, and the director started to grow on me. I thought she did a good job of pursuing the story, getting a balance of viewpoints, and being willing talk about her opinions as they shifted during the movie.
While I can’t see myself joining the “MRA” movement, by the end of the film I found myself agreeing with some of their points. Their arguments are most effective when they are pointing out facts and legitimate examples. When they play the victim card too heavily it’s hard not to think they’re invested because of a single personal grievance instead of the movement as a whole. It’s worth a watch if you’re interested in this topic.
The “truth” is almost always messy, complicated and conflicting. This documentary made a good effort to explain the topic and seek a balanced point of view.
It’s interesting how critics of Obama seem to label him a socialist/communist or an extension of the Republican status quo. (The more intelligent naysayers tend to choose the latter.) I think he was an excellent president given what he inherited and the direction the country (and world) was going in. But that’s just my opinion and I’m not trying to change yours.
It’s been a rough century for sure. Almost everything is undergoing huge structural changes, and with that, chaotic upheaval that’s hard to make sense of. It’s hard to be an optimist, or even a realist in these times.
I don’t know why this movie didn’t bother me more than it did. Maybe I’m just numb to our current reality, but I liked it. Hearing Trump voters explain why they support him (and rationalize his lifetime of immoral behavior) is always interesting to me, too.
The older you get the less it seems to matter. Thank goodness.
I check the Apple Trailers app and filter for docs every couple weeks. There usually have new trailers each time.
A few documentaries I’ve seen recently that felt positive and/or pretty even funny, are the following:
Fastball
The Dwarf in China
Tales from the tour bus
Spielberg’ (latest doc)
The Other F Word
[And not including American Movie would just be negligent. ;) ]
My point didn’t have anything to do with the fact that documentaries have opinions or agendas— they obviously do— my point is that this “documentary” blatantly falls into the category of current political propaganda.
Trump is still in office, and this is clearly a fluff piece, so anyone showing this movie under the pretense that it is a documentary pertaining to valid facts (such as a PBS Frontline episode), should take a look at their ethics.
I have respect for the BBC’s journalism, and for Netflix’s ability to curate quality documentary content, that is why this caught my attention. Had this popped up on YouTube, done by a hack, production-company-for-hire, I wouldn’t care.
I’m surprised he wasn’t talked about more, too. One of the players in the round table talks picked him along with Nolan as the two hardest throwing, I think.
Picking the same point to measure from (or adjusting someone’s speed to match the same universal point) equalizes the speeds recorded, in theory. Also, picking a spot closer to the pitcher’s release point discards variables like altitude, humidity, wind, etc., that could influence speed. It’s not a perfect science, especially given how old some of that data was, but it was interesting to see.
I was surprised that a ball could decelerate by almost 10mph over those 60.5 feet, but I trust the “scientists” over my own hunches.
A “curse of suckage”? I’m not sure I agree. A box office flop doesn’t need necessarily mean the actual movie was bad— and I think a lot of Sandler’s negative publicity has had to do with box office “failures.”
I thought he did a good job in The Meyerowitz Stories. I didn’t feel like I was watching “Adam Sandler”... nor Adam Sandler trying not to be Adam Sandler, if you know what I mean. I liked his character a lot.
Celr, Your point of view is the one I agree with most. Treating the addict as a patient instead of a criminal is still a very progressive idea in the US, but I hope it continues to gain momentum. But you’re right, there is absolutely no way to “legalize drugs.”
I think the closest the US has come to an example of legalizing a hard drug is what happened with the abuse of opioids (via doctors and pharmaceutical companies) from the mid-2000’s until now. Here, we have a drug that’s essentially heroin, with the supply and manufacture controlled and regulated. People that wanted “heroin” went to their doctor and were able to buy it. But this did not end well, because people who desired “heroin” used it and became addicts. This is what the heroin experience is. So, in this best-case, hypothetical scenario, users never had to resort to crime or desperate measures to obtain their drug— but their lives became severely, brutally compromised, and/or they died from their addiction.
There will never be legal crack, meth, heroin, etc., at a local pharmacy (ignoring Pharma’s games to create legal exceptions), thus, there will always be an illegal chain starting with the manufacture and leading through to the dealer.
Drug control is a messy, complicated, and incredibly tough issue. It could be done better, no question, but there is no answer to the essential problem.
Great post Tom, thank you!
Tanning Chatum is in the sequel? I liked the first movie, but f—k that guy is annoying.
Interesting fact, if you go back— even less than a hundred years— the “British accent” that exists now didn’t really exist then. And the “American accent”was also quite different. If nothing, the differences we hear now are quite recent (and continuing to change). A current British accent used as default for anything old or cultured is as silly as Hollywood itself.
I’d say that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is feces flung at this point in time.
TexasJack is completely right. I will add that conspiracies that are dubbed "wacky" or "crackpot," are usually conspiracies that end up abandoning the larger implied argument (here, that the government used 9/11 to justify a war) to play whack-a-mole with the details of the event itself.
I've noticed that a lot of conspiracy theorists have an Aspergers-like obsession with details (such as the temperture that jet fuel burns at) and rarely, if ever, actually care about the consequences of the issue as a whole-- other than to call the government evil or dub it a New World Order. Their interest simply never transcends the details.
Blu-ray is definitely worth buying if it's something you'll rewatch. I view about half my movies on a large screen, and the quality of color and total resolution from a Blu-ray is 2-3X better than "HD" via cable.
Both Verizon and Comcast pass off something like 720p (with DVD quality color and compression) as high definition. It's soft garbage that looks terrible on anything over 40 inches.
Netflix does a really good job with HD movies, and Amazon Prime is generally pretty good to okay. It's as if cable companies are doing everything they can to kill themselves.
I completely agree with you. It's one score I really don't understand.
I don't think I share your opinion. Perhaps if you gave some examples I could understand your point of view. However, I just watched this, and what I took away from it was primarily a sense of despair regarding the welfare system as a whole. Watching this documentary was excruciating.
In terms of bias, I think the documentary captured it, but I didn't feel like the movie *itself* was unfairly biased. It appeared as though every character (except maybe a few at the very top) were on the receiving end of some kind of bias and/or unfair emotional abuse.
I came away from this feeling badly for humanity in general. Neither race, gender nor age seemed to exempt anyone from misery in this documentary. But, as hard as it was to watch, it felt like a validly encapsulated story about welfare.