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Reviews
Profils paysans: La vie moderne (2008)
it doesn't deliver.
while this installment of the series does indeed provide some very beautiful shots of rural France and the people who are farming it, it fails on several levels.
it fails to tell the story of the farmers it's following. unless you believe that sitting around a table in an uncomfortable silence responding to excruciatingly slowly delivered, simplistic questions is a true slice of their lives.
it fails to tell a story at all, barely scratching at the surface of the problems faced by these farmers using traditional methods.
it seems more a vehicle for the filmmaker to proudly tell us repeatedly how well he knows these folks (which is not borne out by the reactions of the farmers to him or his questions), while feeding us sorrowful questions about death in preparation for the mournful, cello-stoked, backwards-view-of-life ending.
American Meth (2008)
Was this a class project?
As a documentary, this has to be one of the poorer ones I've seen recently. The problem of meth is fascinating, and the ubiquity of it means there couldn't be any end to the interesting individuals, interviews, or footage that could be found on the subject...but this docco seems to have found very little.
It's disorganized, inconsistent, poorly shot and poorly edited. The narration switches seemingly at random between Val Kilmer and printed screens (complete with typos). The background of the meth problem from treatment and law enforcement perspectives is jumbled and incomplete.
(An entire section of the movie is devoted to listening to a couple on meth argue while their children run around their trailer - but the lack of editing means the reason for being there is quickly lost and we're left wondering why we set foot in their trailer park in the first place.)
In the end there's no deeper understanding of the problem of meth, and you're left feeling like you've just watched a final project from Film 101.