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Reviews
The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
Insufferable Narcissism that Seems Never to End
I am not a scholar of filmmaking or a Robert Evans superfan. I didn't know who he was. I do enjoy watching good movies the way some people read good books - critically, thoughtfully, and with appreciation for the work that went into them. When I stumbled upon this movie, I thought I would gain some new fascinating insights into movie-making.
Instead, the experience for me was analogous to the following: Imagine you are attending a fancy fundraising dinner full of rich strangers, or a fancy recruiting dinner for a big firm or company where you are interviewing. You are seated at the end of a table next to a man you have never met. Before you can tell him your name or learn his name, and without any further introduction of any sort, he simply begins talking, about himself, at length, without pause. You realize quickly that 1) he assumes you already know exactly who he is; 2) he assumes that you will find his stories absolutely fascinating and that he is bestowing a benevolent gift upon you by sharing these insider anecdotes with you; and 3) he is completely uninterested in the perspective or experiences of anyone else at the table, and has never entertained the thought that they have anything more meaningful to offer than what he is talking about right now. You are cornered. There is no one else near you at the table to talk to. You're not sure how much longer the event will last. You wonder how long you should let him go on before you just get up and leave. Eventually, the event simply ends, and you exit thinking, "Well it's unfortunate that the evening didn't turn out to be more pleasant." And that's how this movie proceeds, for over 90 merciless minutes. Robert Evans just keeps talking about himself, while grainy black and white photos flash on the screen.
At first, I found it interesting, because this pompous blowhard was at least sharing little-known tidbits about some movies I had seen and enjoyed, and therefore I was learning something. But about a half hour in, that feeling went away, and I began to suspect I was not really learning much of anything.
This is because I developed the sinking feeling that my narrator was unreliable. Every story is told solely from Evan's own perspective, and he features prominently as the most important and intelligent and visionary person in every one of them. It's not just that every movie he worked on was, dubiously, the Most Important Movie of Its Time. (Really? "Love Story"? Really??) It's also that, in every story, he is the key person who made a critical decision at some point that forever changed the course of the film's outcome. He is the one who made a critical casting decision, or convinced the director to make a critical editing decision, that shaped the entire film. He is the one who, in a single conversation, persuaded the star actress to finish the film instead of quitting. He is the one who plucked up a particular script and recognized it as exactly the story that America needed to hear at that time. And on and on it goes.
So once I realized I couldn't trust anything he was saying, I was just waiting to see where it went. But there is nothing to help with the pacing. There is no plot or narrative arc to help you know where in the film you are. It just keeps going until it stops.
I thought that a postscript at the end might contain quotes from others in the industry that would either corroborate or undermine Evans's own account of things, and help it all gel together as a documentary with a point of view or message. But it didn't.
The only thing I learned here is that a guy named Robert Evans produced several movies I've seen, some of which I liked, and that man happens to have very, very high self-esteem.
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
This movie was a disaster
This review includes details of the film's content. Not so much spoilers, since the movie never gets any farther than "Dude, don't Republicans like totally suck?"
This movie is not a documentary - it's propaganda. The only thing that fools people into thinking there's anything documentary about it is that it's not even very *good* propaganda. I'm not a particularly conservative person - I generally think some gun control is a good thing, rock music shouldn't be censored, our current welfare and health care systems are woefully inadequate, and more money should be spent on public schools than on missile development. And while we're at it, yes, Michael, slavery is bad and so is the death of children. Duh. But I left the theater disagreeing with Moore to a greater degree than when I entered. He presented incomplete, unsubstantiated, and scatterbrained arguments for all of the (way too many) political positions he attempted to preach. I spent the entire movie silently providing the counterarguments he willfully ignored, without the benefit of hearing how he might rebut them. And since I think I'm pretty smart, I did a good job of convincing myself with my counterarguments.
In addition to the bias problems in structure and content, mentioned in detail by many, here are other random things that really irked me:
--Music, video games, etc, have NO influence on children's level of violence, but watching news about Kosovo magically does? If the nightly news can make kids violent, why can't Marilyn Manson? His one-liner about how the Pres is more influential than himself is so conclusory it's dumb. Most kids don't even watch the news.
--The question Moore posed to Charlton Heston, and then mockingly watched him flounder in answering, is a question that Moore himself never answers throughout the whole movie: the sheer popularity of guns can't be the cause of violence, because Canada has just as many guns as we do. So what causes it? As Heston struggles, on the fly, to come up with perhaps wrong but at least plausible suggestions for a puzzle that Moore himself can't answer, Moore's mockery seems uncalled for and in fact cruel. Heston doesn't end the interview because he doesn't care about 6-year-olds - he ends it because he's being verbally ambushed in his own home by a camera crew and a debate partner who won't fight fair.
--Furthermore, insofar as Heston was slow on the rebuttal...Heston was diagnosed with **Alzheimer's Disease** about the same time as that interview was conducted - a fact Moore doesn't even bother to mention!
--Moore barges into K-mart, pushing the crippled children in front of him as tools in his shock-value-rather-than-policy-debate argument strategy, and proceeds to accost the poor minimum-wage employees who work there.
--The 16-year-old Canadians brag about how their neighbors' tax dollars pay all of their medical bills while *puffing on cigarettes*.
--Moore leapfrogs among issues because he can't argue any one of them successfully enough to make his point. Then, when he's run out of pieces of argument, he switches to the final resource of the desperate demagogue: The psychological tool of rapidly juxtaposing jarring tragic images with images of his political foes, then heightening the emotional impact by adding familiar and beloved music that stands out starkly in message and tone from the images we're viewing. A sort of fireworks-display-finale masterpiece of film editing, effectively programming us to agree with what he could not persuade us to believe. So even if we don't remember any good arguments, we'll remember that we cried, and that somehow it was caused by Republicans.
--Even if we ignore the fact this movie is horribly biased, it _still_ doesn't make any sense. There's no coherent conclusion to be drawn. Moore begins his documentary with an interesting question: What is the source of the staggering levels of gun violence in the United States, particularly among our youth? He then leaves this question completely unanswered. Even if I overlook all of Moore's intellectually dishonest techniques and leave the theater preaching Moore's road to salvation, my message would sound something like this: To decrease gun violence, I should start watching South Park instead of the evening news (because the news is depressing and violent, and that clever South Park creator has pluck!), stop locking my apartment door at night (because trust is good and fear is bad, and faith alone will save me from rape and murder), and stop eating at restaurants that employ poor people commuting by bus from far away (because their unattended children will get shot while they're at work, all because I wanted a burger). This doesn't make any sense at all.
Moore doesn't have any more magical solutions than conservatives about how to stop Columbine from happening again. Not surprising, since the tragedy of youth violence is a complex social phenomenon that can hardly be addressed competently in a 2-hour montage of pop iconography and interviews with unprepared people.
The only reason people think this movie has an important message is because they're not *listening* to the (lack of) message at all. They leave happy because the movie made them feel good; it made them feel good because it appeared to justify their prejudices against conservative politics. The irony is that the movie "justified" their political positions by playing off of those prejudices - by incoherently babbling in familiar-sounding vocabulary, pointing to trendy celebs who share their political leanings, and making people who disagree all look like buffoons.
In short, when the audience clapped in the SOHO theater where I watched this, it was less a reflection on the quality of the movie than it was the audience congratulating itself on being liberal. It's that same self-congratulation that motivated the Democrat-dominated Academy to give this movie Best Documentary, not to mention classify it as a documentary in the first place.