Jess and I went through a phase where we loved watching documentaries. Don’t get me wrong, I still love them, but I just don’t make time to watch them any more really. As much as I love documentaries, however, I am becoming more and more annoyed with the accepted ways that documentaries are made.
Granted, most documentaries are biased. Generally the whole idea is that they are trying to convince you of something that they believe to be true. But I’m getting increasingly more agitated at the type of evidence used to promote a message. In any Michael Moore video you’ll see him doing classy stuff like approaching someone on the spot in their home and then making them look bad when they don’t make time for him. Or in Bill Maher’s new one called Religulous where to prove that religion is ridiculous (I haven’t actually seen the film and I’m basing this off their promotion trailers) they interview fanatical or goofy religious people. Even that new Ben Stein documentary about intelegent design Expelled they were not honest with many that they interviewed and therefore were able to take some things out from their original context.
I guess the idea isn’t often to provide facts but to sell tickets. Can’t falt them for that can we? Ok, my son keeps interupting me and I’m not able to continue my thought process. Do you see where I’m going with this? No? I’ll try to spruce this blog up later.
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Hey Ryan,
Josh and I watch alot of documentaries too. we saw two recently that were pretty interesting. One called KING CORN which is about food in america(two college students helped make it. It’s interesting) and the other is THE END OF SUBURBIA: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream. The second one is a good documentary, maybe a little dooms-dayish and one of the guys on there is kind of a annoying when he speaks, but overall, the message they’re trying to convey is good and worth watching.
We’ve watched king corn (mostly for the name) and it was pretty good. I’ll have to check out the suburbia one that sounds interesting.
ps welcome to bloglandia!