I want to first say that I thought Errol Morris' previous film - the fog of war - was excellent. I am a fan of his style and also of his ambition to take on such large characters of history. However, I think he failed this last attempt quite dramatically. The movie was boring, redundant, un-insightful, and - worst of all - wasted an hour and a half of my life.
In my opinion there are only a few reason why this turned out to be a failure: 1) Don is actually a pretty honest guy (but boring) and remembers quite a lot which takes Errol by surprise 2) Errol didn't pull the trigger on (i.e. address on camera) some big inconsistencies in his memos and his interviews 3) Errol goes into this thinking he has Don with the millions of memos and hours of interview time but then gets completely dismantled by Don in his questioning thus resulting in wasted time/film
While I cannot tell you which is true, the result is a failure by the director to really provide the audience any sort of substance for his money/time. I wish Errol would have either asked Don about more or not marketed the film as something a history buff may like.
Lastly some of my many questions from the movie: Honestly, who really cares about how the words unknown and known are put together in a sentence?? Out of all the interesting stuff this man knows why did you consistently highlight (i.e. use film time for) the fact that hes a word freak and wrote millions of memos? So this guy is pedantic...we get it but who cares??? Why did you show hundreds of newspaper headlines but really not get the bottom of any of them? How did you not find one slip up in those millions of memos? Why did you choose Don if you knew how smart/clever/boring he was?
Do yourself a favor and go watch fog of war and don't waste your time on this like the director did.
In my opinion there are only a few reason why this turned out to be a failure: 1) Don is actually a pretty honest guy (but boring) and remembers quite a lot which takes Errol by surprise 2) Errol didn't pull the trigger on (i.e. address on camera) some big inconsistencies in his memos and his interviews 3) Errol goes into this thinking he has Don with the millions of memos and hours of interview time but then gets completely dismantled by Don in his questioning thus resulting in wasted time/film
While I cannot tell you which is true, the result is a failure by the director to really provide the audience any sort of substance for his money/time. I wish Errol would have either asked Don about more or not marketed the film as something a history buff may like.
Lastly some of my many questions from the movie: Honestly, who really cares about how the words unknown and known are put together in a sentence?? Out of all the interesting stuff this man knows why did you consistently highlight (i.e. use film time for) the fact that hes a word freak and wrote millions of memos? So this guy is pedantic...we get it but who cares??? Why did you show hundreds of newspaper headlines but really not get the bottom of any of them? How did you not find one slip up in those millions of memos? Why did you choose Don if you knew how smart/clever/boring he was?
Do yourself a favor and go watch fog of war and don't waste your time on this like the director did.