Some Kind of Story
Over the weekend I watched last year’s documentary, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I’m not necessarily the biggest Metallica fan out there, but like any guy who went to high school in the 80s or 90s, I’ve got a few riffs burned in my memory somewhere or the other. The movie is definitely worth watching, regardless of how you feel about the music or the band because the story about the people is interesting and the documentary is well done.
I actually think that documentaries are becoming one of my favorite styles of film. Regardless of my interest level in the subject, a talented documentarian can draw me in and make a very interesting ninety minutes or so out of tidal current blooming or duck migrations for all I care. I really enjoy the new style of an immersive story line that usually doesn’t even have a narrator pointing out the plot but instead just letting the subject speak for itself.
I caught a discussion with Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame on Henry (Rollin)’s Film Corner today about this very subject (yes, its on IFC). His view was that documentaries are one of the few unbiased forms of media left out there because most other modes for production are so corporatized. Nowadays a filmmaker can get a top of the line camera and editing setup for about five grand, then distribute their films over BitTorrent or any of the other free distribution mechanisms, and if the buzz catches on then the Internet will spread the word of mouth better than any independent press did before. The result is a viable vehicle for people to tell these stories to the wider audience that was so difficult to access before.
Spurlock’s fantastic dive in to the greasy world of McDonald’s nutrition is aa example of the renaissance of documentaries in action. Even though the corporate behemoth tried to shut him down in every market they went to, the film was so widely viewed that McDonald’s actually gave up the whole concept of “Super Size” on their menus just a couple of months after its wide-scale release. That’s a pretty powerful result for a movie that was produced for about what I can finance on my credit cards.
Now I know we’ve long had entire TV channels dedicated to documentary purposes like Discovery and Animal Planet and what not, but I wonder how long until we get a channel that highlights only the best that the world of documentaries have to offer?
