celluloidnotes

I just wanted to quickly comment on something that I’d like to explore a little more in depth later on. But I was reading a New York Times article about how 2008 is one of the worst years in the last decade for documentaries at the box office, and that oddly there have been more positively reviewed documentaries than in recent years (I don’t have the numbers handy, but I will get them up here soon).

I’ve been watching a lot of the documentaries and feel like there have been some exceptionally strong docs this year, Operation Filmmaker, Young @ Heart, Standard Operating Procedure, The Sugar Curtain, and on and on. But I’m wondering if it’s actually the topics that are not attracting people to the cinema. Since Michael Moore’s bursting doc records at the box office it seems as though documentaries saw something of resurgence in the theaters, but this year (for both narratives and docs) war films have been a notorious failure, and other films are exceptionally well done, but possibly on topics that don’t really matter, topics that are in the news, but may not really be a big draw in the theater. There have been docs on changes to civilian life in Cuba since Castro, steroids in America, a retirement home band, war vets from WWII (East L.A. Marine). This is just a small list, but this seems to be the issue. No one is interested in political films like the above listed or RFK Must Die, Oswald’s Ghost, or Recount. And who cares about steroid use, or a geriatric band? Good films, but the answer seems to be that no one cares.

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